JupyterLab: the next generation of the Jupyter Notebook

Post by muraiki » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 12:58 PM UTC

radiowave wrote: post #68

bicubic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is in line with yours, debugging loops and functions is a big pain point. However, I think there's a much better solution to be had here, which is to add more powerful debugging capabilities to Notebook. I think Notebook has potential for new debugging paradigms, imagine for example being able to break anywhere in a cell and get a new 'forked cell' which operates in the context of the code that you just…

This sounds like a promising idea. As someone who still reaches for a Smalltalk environment when I need to prototype something, ipython notebook is about the closest thing I've ever found to the style of interaction you get with a Smalltalk REPL (aka "workspace"). Smalltalk deliberately blurs the lines between a text editor and REPL, and the debugger takes this a step further - a combined editor and REPL, within a su…

Post by yomritoyj » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 1:12 PM UTC

mjlm wrote: post #71

yomritoyj wrote: post #66

I love how notebooks allow the mixing of code and output and support incremental development by letting you choose which cells to execute. But I find the semantics horrible. Each time you execute a cell you do so in an environment that depends on your entire history and cannot be figured out by simply reading the notebook. I wish for a environment which would have the same semantics as a script but which would snapsh…

I think this persistent state is one of the main advantages of the notebook environment, or the Matlab workspace, which I guess it was inspired by. It allows you to quickly try alternative values for certain variables without having to re-calculate everything. Saving snapshots would not be feasible if the project contains large amounts of data. If you want to reset everything, just "run all" from the beginning, or us…

Post by takluyver » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 1:34 PM UTC

j2kun wrote: post #42

maus42 wrote: post #40

I like the idea of executable cells for developing. It's been a couple of years since I played around with Jupyter notebooks, but then I got frustrated quite soon: Stepping outside my preferred editor (vim) was annoying, likewise I had no idea if (how?) I could export the code out of notebook to a regular .py text file (without clumsily copypasting each cell). And the .ipynb files itself seem quite terrible to manage…

There's a one-line terminal command to convert to. It's like `jupyter nbconvert -o python` or something. Works okay out of the box, and has some meager customizability.

Post by yomritoyj » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

dalailambda wrote: post #77

yomritoyj wrote: post #66

I love how notebooks allow the mixing of code and output and support incremental development by letting you choose which cells to execute. But I find the semantics horrible. Each time you execute a cell you do so in an environment that depends on your entire history and cannot be figured out by simply reading the notebook. I wish for a environment which would have the same semantics as a script but which would snapsh…

I imagine with a little introspection, a notebook can figure out dependencies between cells and cascade as needed.

Post by rhodin » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 2:40 PM UTC

mjlm wrote: post #71

yomritoyj wrote: post #66

I love how notebooks allow the mixing of code and output and support incremental development by letting you choose which cells to execute. But I find the semantics horrible. Each time you execute a cell you do so in an environment that depends on your entire history and cannot be figured out by simply reading the notebook. I wish for a environment which would have the same semantics as a script but which would snapsh…

I think this persistent state is one of the main advantages of the notebook environment, or the Matlab workspace, which I guess it was inspired by. It allows you to quickly try alternative values for certain variables without having to re-calculate everything. Saving snapshots would not be feasible if the project contains large amounts of data. If you want to reset everything, just "run all" from the beginning, or us…