Improving documentation for Julia as MIT 18.337 Class Project

[velicanu]

Dear Julia community,

As my final project for a class I am taking, I would like to propose and implement an improved documentation for Julia. See this link for my proposal: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qxrztntmyqflsfe/DragosVelicanu_ProjectProposal_Fall2013_18337.pdf

Cheers,
Dragos

[jiahao]

There are several relevant issues which you will want to consult: #762, #1619, #2567, JuliaLang/LinearAlgebra.jl#10, #3988, #4226, #4227, #4579.

[Keno]

I should also point out that the readline-based REPL is on its way out. That's good news though since it means you'll be able to share code between the new REPL and the IJulia kernel.

[ivarne]

Proposal 3 is actually implemented in the most recent readline-REPL as of #4361, but as @loladiro points out, the REPL functionality will change a lot when 0.2 gets released and the developers starts using and improving the new julia based replacement.

You also link to the 0.1.0 version of the documentation, and julia has improved a lot since that release was made.

[timholy]

This sounds really great. One thing to keep in mind is that many functions accept "untyped" arguments (for good reasons). In such cases some examples of legitimate input and the resulting output would still be helpful, but you won't be able to give an exhaustive list.

[StefanKarpinski]

I'm increasingly convinced that we should use IJulia for documentation, as proposed in #4579, except without the round trip translation stuff I proposed there – just .ipynb files as checked-in documentation. The master version of IPython uses names instead of UUIDs as URLs for notebooks, which allows linking between notebooks. It wouldn't be too tough to create TOC functionality and convert the manual and stdlib docs into a set of notebooks.

Both IJulia and the new REPL should use the same completion infrastructure to do things like tab completion. Currently IJulia seems to have the lead on this functionality but they should be brought into sync. If we could make our REPL tab menu behavior as slick as zsh's, I would be a very happy man.

[JeffBezanson]

This is a fine discussion, but not actually an issue.