Julia default installation instructions include juliaup, a handy manager that allows you to switch Julia versions and set the default one for your system. It has the same purpose as pyenv.
For this exercise, you just need one version, let’s make it the latest: Julia 1.10.0 But if you want to see if you have other Julia installs on your computer, or what else you can do, in the terminal (or PowerShell if using Windows), type
juliaupThis will return a list of commands with explanations.
Once you’ve installed Julia, you can use it without further ado. Just type julia in the terminal. This starts the Julia REPL, i.e. an interactive Julia interpreter. You quit using exit().
Visual Studio Code is popular and Julia community is very active in developing a Julia Extension for this IDE. Usually the website identifies your system and offers the right download. You can add the Julia Extension from within VS Code once it is running on your computer. It will use the Julia installation that is in your PATH, which is usually what has been set by juliaup.
If you are reluctant to install VS Code because of its tracking options, you can use VS Codium. It is the same IDE, but without tracking (for what it’s worth). I do not know how it affects work with Julia Extension, but tracking in the extension is disabled, unless you opt in.
Once in VS Code, you can either create scripts (a text file with a .jl extension) and run them interactively or start the terminal within VS Code and run Julia commands in the same way as in the REPL.