When you try to install julia on MacOS X 10.7.3, you may see the make fail because wget is not installed. Easy to fix with:
brew install wget
[Edit] git page says gfortran (and wget) are downloaded and compiled, but if they're not already installed make fails. So...
brew install gfortran
The need to do this separately may have to do with licensing?
[Edit] And if you're not root, install to /usr/share/julia will fail. So you'll need to do:
sudo make install
I'm sure all this is perfectly obvious to Unix-heads who are inured to this sort of abuse, but I'm a Mac-head, used to things that Just Work, and I hate this shit.
Sorry! The only thing I can say in our defense is that this is pretty trivial compared to installing a lot of scientific computing packages. But seriously, we'd like a drag-and-drop Mac installer. Anyone want to do that? (Only half kidding.)
Stepping back a bit, this is one of the reasons why having an entirely web-based experience is appealing — then you can let people use a known-good setup without needing to mess around with installing a fairly extensive amount of software just to get basic things to work. Then there's also the general appeal of doing big data work a la Google docs or Gmail. The trick is getting the user experience to be good enough on the web.
Someone just submitted a patch that uses curl on OS X. Also, no need for root, because julia will run out of the directory it is built in. Hopefully, someone who knows more about mac packaging will build a drag-and-drop installer.
brew install wget
[Edit] git page says gfortran (and wget) are downloaded and compiled, but if they're not already installed make fails. So...
brew install gfortran
The need to do this separately may have to do with licensing?
[Edit] And if you're not root, install to /usr/share/julia will fail. So you'll need to do:
sudo make install
I'm sure all this is perfectly obvious to Unix-heads who are inured to this sort of abuse, but I'm a Mac-head, used to things that Just Work, and I hate this shit.