Update on the Julia syllabus

Exercism Building Exercism
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This is still making progress, in fits and starts. We currently have 13 concept/exercise pairs on the website as wip, with several more in progress.

I think it is currently only visible to maintainers: @depial and myself, staff, and (I assume) cross-track maintainers. Is that correct?

It currently looks like this:

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The aim is to have it look more like this. Julia is a big, batteries-included language, so we have a long way to go.

There is one obvious problem in its current state: Vectors/Elyse’s Enchantments is not unlocking correctly. This has been part of a wider pattern, of tripping over legacy code from a previous attempt at a syllabus (different people, several years ago). We’re working to fix this, but good advice is always welcome.

It would have been much easier to start from a clean slate. Too late for us, but maybe a warning for other tracks (Rust?) restarting a syllabus.

Caveat : My focus has been on trying to get the high-level structure of the syllabus right, without getting bogged down in detailed wordsmithing. Expect some rough edges at this stage!

Also, prereqs are a bit provisional for the later concepts. Expect these to move around a bit in the coming weeks, as we get more concepts merged.

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I can report (happily!) that Vectors is now fixed.

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Next steps:

  • There are 7 concepts with unmerged draft PRs. Of those, 4 are pretty common across tracks, so there are plausible exercises to port to Julia. That would take us to 17.
  • The argument about Complex Numbers rumbles on. See Looking for Concept Exercise ideas for background, and PR #868 for recent developments.
  • We need to clean up some prerequisites. Also, no doubt, some typos (they breed and multiply when you’re not looking).
  • We can argue for all eternity about detailed wording!

I’m not sure what the process will be to take this further. We can go on writing new concepts for months, but at some point (not yet!) we will want to make it visible to a wider group of students/critics. How does that work?

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You set .status.concept_exercises to true in config.json

{
  ...
  "status": {
    "concept_exercises": true,
    ...

It’s either on or off for students. It’s just maintainers that can see WIP things.

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Thanks for that. Would we also change the individual exercise statuses from “wip” to “beta”? I’m unclear about how this interacts with status.concept_exercises.

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With 15 concepts now on the syllabus, we’ve turned on the Learn tab. The exercises are still “wip”, so most students are seeing nothing.

After discussions with @BethanyG, we hope the full syllabus will become visible to cross-track maintainers.

If necessary, we’ll set the exercises to “beta”, but it would be good to get a sanity-check first.

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I just checked, and I cannot see the syllabus. :slightly_frowning_face: I am enrolled in the track – so it appears that the wip trick is not working.

sigh

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I’m sure you can now. So can everybody else…

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Just solved Lasagna

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Probably not the hardest thing you’ve done today.

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FYI - There’s another topic about the released syllabus. That might be a better place to post any criticism when you find problems with it. Doubtless, there will be problems!!