What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
web.eecs.utk.edu
What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
1–10 of 223 posts
Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
#2See also Joel Grus' talk, "I Don't Like Notebooks": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U
slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1n2RlMdmv1p25Xy5thJUh...
Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
#3The FastAI people have been working on a lot of these issues with their NBDev too: https://www.fast.ai/2019/12/02/nbdev/
Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
#4Trying my best to solve some of these: https://github.com/wrnrlr/foxtrot
Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
#5I want a notebook where causality can only flow forward through the cells. I hate notebook time-loops where a variable from a deleted cell can still be in scope.
1. Checkpoint the interpreter state after every cell execution.
2. If I edit a cell, roll back to the previous checkpoint and let execution follow from there.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen accidental persistence of dead state waste hours of people's time.
Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
#6(A frequent Jupyter Notebook user here. For data exploration, and teaching deep learning - then Colab is indispensable.)
The main question is: what are the alternatives, for data exploration (and sharing its results). Similarly, for data science tool demos, Notebooks shine.
IMHO the problem is not in the notebooks, but in how they are being used (i.e. the workflow). By writing scripts in py files, and using notebooks only to show their results (processed data, charts, etc) we get the best of both worlds.
The only build-in problem with Jupyter Notebooks is JSON, mixing input and output (and making it pain to work with version control). But here RMarkdown (and a few other alternatives) work well.
Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
#7No mention of https://observablehq.com notebooks? They’re the best I’ve found in the “Share and collaborate” and “As products” category. JupyterLab is still pretty great for exploratory stuff, but visualization possibilities in observable are incredible.
Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
#8This is a solid list. It will be even better if juxtaposed with current efforts to solve each of these problems - every DS I know is addressing at least 2-3 of these with some pet tools in their own environment. For example, we use Panel and Holoviews to make data exploration much easier. I have a feeling the ecosystem would improve faster if we had an index of (partial) solutions aligned with this problem set.
One category left out of the list: testing of data pipelines (c.f. great expectations).
Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
#9No mention of https://observablehq.com notebooks? They’re the best I’ve found in the “Share and collaborate” and “As products” category. JupyterLab is still pretty great for exploratory stuff, but visualization possibilities in observable are incredible.
No one we interviewed or surveyed mentioned it.
Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
#10Co-author of the study here. Let me know if you have any questions or how you overcome some of the problems we identified!