About Julia programming language, in my own experience so far

Julia is really easy to use and the syntax is amazingly user-friendly. I haven't seen odd or cryptic syntax that would leave me scratching my head for answers. Having coded in Ruby I can see the similarity in syntax as well. Much of Julia's functions are build in and the same can be said about the help documentation. Julia makes use of packages. These are build in functions, modules which freeing up the developer to focus on the problem at hand. Overall this is an amazing programming language to learn and experiment with. And yes it is open source too.

Covid19

Using covid19 data from the Github COVID-19 Data Repository at Johns Hopkins University) a plot graph can be presented with Julia. The final plotted graph is an attempt (the result of my home work so far) to achieve the result as presented with the Julia Academy Data Science online course.

Installation

The documentation on Jupyter Notebook(https://jupyter.org/)is straightforward for the platform it is being used on. You should be familiar with the Windows CommandLine and MacOS- and Linux Terminal because packages and instructions can be achieved in those ways. With this project I use Atom with Juno AKA JuliaPro and Visual Studio Code interchangeably. There is much on the internet to learn about the Julia programming language. Online courses and videos, lectures from Julia Academy and reading material are part of many resources one can make use of. And feel free to engage with the Julia community to learn more.

Usage

My plotted graph has been tested on both Windows and MacOS platform. Take note of using these two different platforms as files and directories can be generated by build systems. You can ignore those by adding the necassary files in .gitignore. Comments and how-I-got-to-do-it steps are available in the covid19globalcases.ipynb file extension.

using Interact, using CSV etc..are packages used to interact and manipulate data in the form of a graph/widget

These packages are installed once.

I prefer to install these package through cmd or terminal before starting using them in my Jupyter Notebook.

In your command line, after you have successfully installed Julia and adding it in your environment path, enter the following commands:

> julia press enter/return) "This will bring you into Julia REPL"

> import Pkg (press enter/return)

pkg.add("Interact")(press enter/return)

Alternatively, once in Julia REPL you hit the ] and enter add Interact which will the package as well.

NB: With the package Interactyou can make intuitive graphs. As far as I have tested this package it cooperates in Windows. On macOS (I use Catalina 10.15.4) however, when you use @manipulate to create widgets an error message appears saying that WebIO has not been detected, even though the WebIO package is installed. If your having issues getting a widget to work on your mac machine, try the following:

Head to the weblink provided with the error message and read the documentation provided - https://juliagizmos.github.io/WebIO.jl/latest/troubleshooting/not-detected/

And if all fails you can try the following instructions which works for me;

1. Gracefully close any Jupyter Notebook session. This means go to File - Close and Halt. Close your Julia REPL as well.

2. In Terminal enter the following: jupyter nbextension list and you should see something similar if WebIO and configuration were installed;

    Known nbextensions:
    config dir: /Users/your username/.jupyter/nbconfig
    notebook section
    webio-jupyter-notebook  enabled
    Validating: OK
    config dir: /usr/local/etc/jupyter/nbconfig
    notebook section
    jupyter-js-widgets/extension  enabled
    Validating: OK
   

3. Continue by entering the following commands in terminal as shown in the troubleshooting documentation:

   jupyter nbextension uninstall --user webio/main jupyter nbextension uninstall --user webio-jupyter-notebook

4. Re-install the Jupyter Notebook extension:

   using WebIO WebIO.install_jupyter_nbextension()

5. After you have re-installed the webIO open Julia REPL and enter the following command:

   /Users/your username/opt/miniconda3/bin/jupyter nbextension enable --user webio-jupyter-notebook

6. The following should appear; Enabling notebook extension webio-jupyter-notebook... - Validating: OK

7. Start your Jupyter Notebook and enjoy using widgets.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change. Please make sure to update tests as appropriate.

License

MIT