An organized community project

[PaVan Jakati]

HI Folks,

This is Pavan here. 

To be frank , i had never heard name of any programming language called as Julia. Today , i happened to meet one of it's core creator who impressed with a presentation which talked a lot in short about Julia and its purpose and i am sure it has lot more than that. I quickly browsed the site using my tablet and found one single page showing mailing list for its community . 

I was really surprised to see a single page for such a big project . An idea struck me which goes like this .

1: We can have a well organized community .

- > Can be created using open source tools such as buddypress , phpBB, 

-> More about such tools can be found here 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software

2: We can have host source on SourceForge .

With this , we can earn trust of many as SF is known for better open source tools. 

I am sure there should be discussion going around to take action towards promoting community , bringing more users and contributors. It's just the idea i had when i saw the website. Please update if i can be of any help with the plan . Thanks. 

[Stefan Karpinski]

Thanks for the interest, Pavan. I'm not sure where you got the impression that there's only one page devoted to Julia. Perhaps you overlooked the row of links beneath the Julia logo:

julia | source | downloads | docs | blog | community | teaching | publications | rss

There's a rather extensive online manual and standard library reference. We use GitHub for source code hosting and issue tracking, as well as discussion of issues and proposed changes. GitHub is incomparably better and more useful than SourceForge ever was (not to mention that there are no ads on it).

[Isaiah Norton]

Moving to sourceforge or changing list servers is probably not in the cards, but I think you have a very useful point: when a new person goes to http://julialang.org it is completely non-obvious how much activity is bubbling underneath the surface, especially for those who may be unfamiliar with GitHub or with gauging activity in an open source project by looking at commit logs, issue trackers, and archives of the mailing list.

At this point in Julia's development "social proof" is increasingly important, and as we approach the 0.2 release it may be beneficial to more prominently highlight community activities on the homepage (maybe a commit ticker or some such).

Meanwhile, please have a look at https://github.com/julialang and the subordinate projects.

Additionally, the packages listed here can give a good sense of the development activity in the community:

https://github.com/JuliaLang/METADATA.jl

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 2:04 PM, PaVan Jakati <pan...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Stefan Karpinski]

Perhaps the homepage is due for a revamp that can better introduce people to the community and resources. I've opened an issue: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julialang.github.com/issues/63.

[Iain Dunning]

I think #1 thing we can do at this point is create a meta-blog, like we were talking about in that other thread.

[Carlo Baldassi]

About SourceForge, I'll just note that GIMP (which hosted Windows binaries there) abandoned it just a few days ago, see www.gimp.org:

"SourceForge, once a useful and trustworthy place to develop and host FLOSS applications, has faced a problem with the ads they allow on their sites - the green "Download here" buttons that appear on many, many adds leading to all kinds of unwanted utilities have been spotted there as well."

"The tipping point was the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge."

[Stefan Karpinski]

Ouch. That's all really bad. So yeah, at this point, I think it's not a good idea to host anything on SourceForge.

[Jared Kofron]

you all may know this but github does static page hosting as well - so if there was interest in starting a julia blog, it could be a good option to host on github with jekyll or similar to have a nice tight coupling between the blog itself and the source.

[Jiahao Chen]

you all may know this but github does static page hosting as well - so if there was interest in starting a julia blog, it could be a good option to host on github with jekyll or similar to have a nice tight coupling between the blog itself and the source.

A Julia blog already exists, although admittedly it could be updated more frequently and regularly.

[Jeremy West]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 12:52:59PM -0800, Iain Dunning wrote:
> I think #1 thing we can do at this point is create a meta-blog, like we
> were talking about in that other thread.

I've been really wishing for a meta-blog or 'Planet Julia'. I love
seeing the blogs submitted to the mailing list, but for other more
casual users having access to some repository of information like that
would be really useful with practical Julia examples being used in the
'real world'.

>
> On Monday, November 11, 2013 3:07:00 PM UTC-5, Stefan Karpinski wrote:
> >
> > Perhaps the homepage is due for a revamp that can better introduce people
> > to the community and resources. I've opened an issue:
> > https://github.com/JuliaLang/julialang.github.com/issues/63.
> >
> >

> > On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 11:42 AM, Isaiah Norton <isaiah...@gmail.com<javascript:>

> > > wrote:
> >
> >> Moving to sourceforge or changing list servers is probably not in the
> >> cards, but I think you have a very useful point: when a new person goes to
> >> http://julialang.org it is completely non-obvious how much activity is
> >> bubbling underneath the surface, especially for those who may be unfamiliar
> >> with GitHub or with gauging activity in an open source project by looking
> >> at commit logs, issue trackers, and archives of the mailing list.
> >>
> >> At this point in Julia's development "social proof" is increasingly
> >> important, and as we approach the 0.2 release it may be beneficial to more
> >> prominently highlight community activities on the homepage (maybe a commit
> >> ticker or some such).
> >>
> >> Meanwhile, please have a look at https://github.com/julialang and the
> >> subordinate projects.
> >> Additionally, the packages listed here can give a good sense of the
> >> development activity in the community:
> >> https://github.com/JuliaLang/METADATA.jl
> >>
> >>

> >> On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 2:04 PM, PaVan Jakati <pan...@gmail.com<javascript:>

> >> > wrote:
> >>
> >>> HI Folks,
> >>>
> >>> This is Pavan here.
> >>>
> >>> To be frank , i had never heard name of any programming language called
> >>> as Julia. Today , i happened to meet one of it's core creator who impressed
> >>> with a presentation which talked a lot in short about Julia and its purpose
> >>> and i am sure it has lot more than that. I quickly browsed the site using
> >>> my tablet and found one single page showing mailing list for its community
> >>> .
> >>>
> >>> I was really surprised to see a single page for such a big project . An
> >>> idea struck me which goes like this .
> >>>
> >>> 1: We can have a well organized community .
> >>>
> >>> - > Can be created using open source tools such as buddypress , phpBB,
> >>> -> More about such tools can be found here
> >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software
> >>>
> >>> 2: We can have host source on SourceForge .
> >>>
> >>> With this , we can earn trust of many as SF is known for better open
> >>> source tools.
> >>>
> >>> I am sure there should be discussion going around to take action towards
> >>> promoting community , bringing more users and contributors. It's just the
> >>> idea i had when i saw the website. Please update if i can be of any help
> >>> with the plan . Thanks.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >

--
Jeremy West
Research Assistant
Intelligent Systems and Controls Laboratory
Michigan Technological University

[John Myles White]

If somebody wants to help, we could just set up Wordpress with the plugin that Randy mentioned R-Bloggers uses on the juliablogs.com domain name I registered.

— John

[Jiahao Chen]

There is a Julia subreddit. Time to resurrect it? Or do we want something more than that?

[Jared Kofron]

i would vote for something more - for example, i really like the format and content that's at blog.golang.org.

[John Lynch]

I liked the subreddit; thanks Jiahao, I hadn't seen it.

I suspect there is a need to pull more things together but wonder if its a job for a semi-pro blogger.  I looked at the Google Go blog and seriously cringed - there is a marketer at work there using quotes to give the appearance of truth.

FYI I just checked out Julia's popularity :)

On TIOBE go ranks 49 and Julia enters the chart at position 167.