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The Future of Notebooks: Lessons from JupyterCon

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Re: The Future of Notebooks: Lessons from JupyterCon

#2

Post by jdonaldson »

"jupyter is the new bash"

As much as I love Jupyter this is a bridge too far even for me. There's nothing about Jupyter that makes sense for non-interactive scripting. Although, I suppose it would help you do block chain calculations... which would also be a terrible idea.

Re: The Future of Notebooks: Lessons from JupyterCon

#4

Post by gaius »

When you consider that it is impossible to reuse notebooks in each other... Or unit test them... Or that it is not especially easy to version control them in any sort of branch/merge workflow... Jupyter Notebooks are much closer to Excel spreadsheets than they are to what most people would consider actual programs.

Re: The Future of Notebooks: Lessons from JupyterCon

#5

Post by adw »

jdonaldson wrote: post #2

"jupyter is the new bash" As much as I love Jupyter this is a bridge too far even for me. There's nothing about Jupyter that makes sense for non-interactive scripting. Although, I suppose it would help you do block chain calculations... which would also be a terrible idea.

Inline documentation and charting (which for data tasks is a honking huge deal). It's literate programming with an actual use-case. Very into this idea.

Re: The Future of Notebooks: Lessons from JupyterCon

#6

Post by gaius »

jakelarkin wrote: post #3

I understand why they became popular, but as a software engineer considering how they work, I am just full of disappointment. we're going to spend the next ten years re-inventing every single software engineering best practice for jupyter's weirdo environment.

In the mid-90s I was a Mech Eng undergrad using a program called MathCAD which provided a "notebook" interactive computation mixed with text environment by running as a Word plugin. In 2018 I use Jupyter and it's not clear where the progress has been. There are too many compromises trying to make it work in a web browser. For what Jupyter is for I find that RStudio or Spyder are infinitely superior. I do interactive exploring and transforming that into both documents and reusable and deployable code all in the one tool

Re: The Future of Notebooks: Lessons from JupyterCon

#8

Post by akhilcacharya »

jdonaldson wrote: post #2

"jupyter is the new bash" As much as I love Jupyter this is a bridge too far even for me. There's nothing about Jupyter that makes sense for non-interactive scripting. Although, I suppose it would help you do block chain calculations... which would also be a terrible idea.

I don't think the full talk for that is out yet but I think it could be brilliant. Literate bash scripts with built in metrics reporting that you can just pull out if necessary? Documentation and selective re-run? Sign me up!

Re: The Future of Notebooks: Lessons from JupyterCon

#9

Post by zmmmmm »

jakelarkin wrote: post #3

I understand why they became popular, but as a software engineer considering how they work, I am just full of disappointment. we're going to spend the next ten years re-inventing every single software engineering best practice for jupyter's weirdo environment.

This is definitely one of my concerns too. Ad hoc code inside these notebooks is almost completely unmanageable from any reasonable software maintenance perspective, and refactoring code out of them is prohibitively difficult as well. I really want something to emerge that combines the best of both worlds of an IDE and notebook development, but there isn't anything close currently.
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