Students and community members gathered in small groups to learn about the latest in programming technology, a programming language called Julia. The room was nearly full, with around 20 people in attendance.
For those interested in learning coding, the event “Jump into Julia” is a good introduction. Julia is an open source programming language used for numerical analysis.
This meet-up was part of the Tech Tacos series hosted from 5 p.m to 6:30 p.m on Tuesday in the 71 North Partnership Studio at 217 Normal Road.
Each event focuses on a different topic in a lecture, typically led by a professor. After the lecture, there’s a Q&A followed by a brief walk to La Salsa (Tacos Salsas Y Carnitas), located at 901 Lucinda Ave. Suite B, where guests are invited for complimentary tacos courtesy of the 71 North Partnership Studio.
The event is meant to build community and acts as a casual meet-up for those interested in learning coding methods.
First-year student Tristen Naylor enhanced his coding experience through the event.
“I attended the workshop because I wanted to learn more about coding and resources related to computer science. Even though I’m an undecided major, it was still given to me as research to get to know what the opportunity is like,” Naylor said. “I had fun coding back then in high school, but since coding may be more advanced in college, I loved coming to the workshop to get my own experience.”
The computer language is good for solving complex math and interpreting data. Nathan Krislock, associate professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, was the guest lecturer at Tuesday’s event.
Krislock said Julia has an easier user interface than Python – another coding language – and is quicker to work with as Julia remembers outputs more effectively.
“It always outputs what you last ran in the cell, whereas in Python it doesn’t do that. So in Python I found it got annoying,” Krislock said.
He also mentioned how important coding is as well as the importance of knowing how to give computers commands.
“You know programming is just essential, like you need to know how to do this, that’s not just something you calculate by hand,” Krislock said. “Any real problems out in the real world that you can’t solve by hand you need a computer. Computers can do these things automatically. You need to know how to give instructions to the computer to solve these problems.”
The next Tech Taco event will be on Oct. 14 at the 71 North Partnership Studio. This event will focus on Metis, NIU’s Center for Research Computing and Data’s main high-performance computing cluster (HPC). HPCs are used to solve complex data-intensive problems.
