What’s wrong with computational notebooks? • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?

#131

Post by heinrichhartman » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 8:50 AM UTC

graphpapa wrote: post #120

etangent wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing the complaint about state and I am getting sick of it. JUST HIT "RESTART KERNEL AND RERUN ALL CELLS," HOW HARD CAN IT BE?

Well if block 1 takes ages but everything after that is dependant 2->3->4 etc. Obviously it would be nice to just re-run block two and have those changes cascade

I break long running data imports out into seperate Notebooks or .py files, and persist the results.

Always restart&re-run for usable results.

Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?

#132

Post by randomsearch » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 8:51 AM UTC

For those asking “what’s the alternative”, RStudio and Matlab already solved the design problem (though they could be better executed).

Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?

#133

Post by VvR-Ox » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 9:07 AM UTC

I would love to see some gifted people using this info to further improve tools like nteract[0].

It already eases a lot of pain you may have in comparison when setting up jupyter notebook without the knowledge of a software developer.

[0]: https://nteract.io/

Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?

#134

Post by dkersten » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #96

azhenley wrote: post #10

Co-author of the study here. Let me know if you have any questions or how you overcome some of the problems we identified!

> Co-author of the study here. Let me know if you have any questions or how you overcome some of the problems we identified! It's not clear who the audience is. It sounds like most people who complain about them are software people and not researchers/scientists. For someone like me, who once did computational research using MATLAB, and later analyzed data for my job, Jupyter is not worse, and is in most ways superio…

Much of your comment could be summarised as “it’s no worse than prior tools”. That doesn’t invalidate the authors points though: just because it’s better than previous tools, which have the same or worse problems, doesn’t mean notebooks don’t have problems that should perhaps be tackled or talked about. That it’s an improvement over what existed before doesn’t mean you can’t be critical about the flaws it still has and a study like this (looking at real people) and discussion like we’re having here is a necessary start to finding out how to improve on this.

Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?

#135

Post by Sean1708 » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 9:30 AM UTC

etangent wrote: post #100

fryguy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with notebooks is that I feel like the natural mental model for them is a spreadsheet mental model, not a REPL mental model. Under that assumption, changing a calculation in the middle means that all of the cells that depend on that calculation would be updated, but instead you need to go and manually re-run the cells after it that depend on that calculation (or re-run the entire notebook) to see the effec…

I keep seeing the complaint about state and I am getting sick of it. JUST HIT "RESTART KERNEL AND RERUN ALL CELLS," HOW HARD CAN IT BE?

Maybe I'm missing a joke here, but if that's your workflow then there's absolutely no advantage to notebooks over something like Spyder or even VS Code.

Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?

#136

Post by tomgp » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 9:46 AM UTC

rabryan35 wrote: post #7

No 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.

Agreed, Observable fixes a lot of the problems I've had with other notebooks. It can still be fiddly for code over a certain size/ complexity but the ability to import from npm modules goes a long way to fixing the problem. The user base seems to be predominantly drawn from the visualisation side of things + the fact that it's javascript may limit its uptake in science/maths areas. Aside: I've felt for a while that JS is really missing decent maths/stats libraries, any suggestions?

Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?

#137

Post by Evidlo » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 9:51 AM UTC

I wrote a plugin for ipython that some people might find useful: https://github.com/uiuc-sine/ipython-cells

It lets you do linear execution of blocks like in Jupyter, but in a normal .py file. Obviously more lightweight than Jupyter and you get to use your regular editor.

Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?

#138

Post by Rainymood » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 10:12 AM UTC

People love jupyter notebooks for the same reason people love Excel.

This is intended to be a Zen-like Koan, so take it as you will.

Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?

#139

Post by bipson » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 10:17 AM UTC

mirekrusin wrote: post #129

djrobstep wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why so defensive?

Maybe because of the negative sentiment/bad taste statements like "What's wrong with..." leave. It could say "What can be improved with ... in 2020" instead. Probably not intention of the author but it comes as non-constructive crtiticism/"not recommended to use" a bit too much. Some observations seem to not be directly related to notebooks per se. Other feel like could be made as just entries in a FAQ/best practices…

"What's wrong with ..." for me literally means "What should be done about ..." or "How to make ... better".

I found your defense, which basically just says "It wasn't better before - so, no critique allowed?", considerably less valuable than the article.

Re: What’s wrong with computational notebooks?

#140

Post by funklute » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 10:18 AM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #2

See also Joel Grus' talk, "I Don't Like Notebooks": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1n2RlMdmv1p25Xy5thJUh...

Superb talk! It's worth noting that a lot of the issues he brings up, ultimately stem from the format in which Jupyter notebooks are stored. R notebooks, with their plain-text stored format as well as code-chunk parameters, solve some, but not all, of these problems.