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Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices

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Re: Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices

#11

Post by Jugurtha »

trash3 wrote: post #4

Has anyone from a SE background used this? I come from data science so I and peers use Jupiter notebooks for everything. I've never used a proper IDE so I wouldn't have anything to compare it to. But I need to start wrangling in people's notebooks and am hoping nbdev does the trick.

I will use it soon. We want to support fast.ai[0] courses on our machine learning platform[1], and wanted a way to easily test the notebooks. I asked one of the people behind fast.ai, and they told me they use nbdev to test their notebooks.

- [0]: https://www.fast.ai/

- [1]: https://iko.ai

Re: Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices

#12

Post by kowlo »

rwhaling wrote: post #6
kowlo wrote: post #3

The author writes > we decided to assist fastai in their development of a new, literate programming environment for Python, called nbdev. but this is followed by: > nbdev builds on top of Jupyter notebooks to fill these gaps and provides the following features is it a new environment, or is it an extended Jupyter Notebook? It looks like Jupyter Notebook to me. Why not Jupyter Lab? > JupyterLab: Jupyter’s Next-Generat…

for background, the original author of nbdev has a good post outlining exactly how it relates to jupyter - https://www.fast.ai/2019/12/02/nbdev/

Strange... "Nbdev is a system for something that we call exploratory programming." but no citation... the phrasing suggests this is something they believe they've come up with a name for?

Re: Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices

#13

Post by tmabraham »

kowlo wrote: post #12
rwhaling wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for background, the original author of nbdev has a good post outlining exactly how it relates to jupyter - https://www.fast.ai/2019/12/02/nbdev/

Strange... "Nbdev is a system for something that we call exploratory programming." but no citation... the phrasing suggests this is something they believe they've come up with a name for?

The term has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_programming

Re: Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices

#14

Post by ipsum2 »

pmdulaney wrote: post #5

I love democracy, but somehow there is something cloying about the use of "democratize" in this context.

For some strange reason, everyone in the ML community refers to 'increasing adoption' as 'democratizing'. It's my pet peeve.

Re: Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices

#15

Post by tmabraham »

I really enjoy using nbdev. I am a fastai user but also a researcher, and I have been using nbdev for my research projects. Because everything is in Jupyter Notebooks, it's much easier to document your work as you are working. Nbdev will build docs and run tests based on the jupyter notebooks and everything is quite flexible!

Here is a small project of mine highlighting some of the capabilities of nbdev: https://github.com/tmabraham/UPIT

Re: Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices

#16

Post by nvrspyx »

ipsum2 wrote: post #14
pmdulaney wrote: post #5

I love democracy, but somehow there is something cloying about the use of "democratize" in this context.

For some strange reason, everyone in the ML community refers to 'increasing adoption' as 'democratizing'. It's my pet peeve.

I mean, increased adoption is a result of democratization (e.g. more accessible). I think the usage here is fine because Jupyter notebooks are definitely more accessible to those new to programming than a typical Python environment and this expands Jupyter to be used for more development purposes, like building libraries.

Re: Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices

#17

Post by kowlo »

tmabraham wrote: post #13
kowlo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange... "Nbdev is a system for something that we call exploratory programming." but no citation... the phrasing suggests this is something they believe they've come up with a name for?

The term has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_programming

I'm aware, what I'm confused about is why they've phrased it as if it's something they call exploratory programming, as if they've coined the term.

Re: Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices

#18

Post by st1x7 »

Sigh. I really think that the only reason notebooks are so popular is that Python never had a popular IDE with a high-quality REPL where people can learn to work interactively while writing code in plain text.

R illustrates this very well - as an R user you can have your pick between RStudio, Jupyter and Rmarkdown and the overwhelming majority of users pick RStudio and notebooks are reserved only for a niche set of use cases. It also speaks volumes that almost no one writes R in Jupyter even though it's supported very well - R users just have better options available to them.

Re: Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices

#19

Post by minimaxir »

st1x7 wrote: post #18

Sigh. I really think that the only reason notebooks are so popular is that Python never had a popular IDE with a high-quality REPL where people can learn to work interactively while writing code in plain text. R illustrates this very well - as an R user you can have your pick between RStudio, Jupyter and Rmarkdown and the overwhelming majority of users pick RStudio and notebooks are reserved only for a niche set of u…

You bring up RStudio but not the R Notebooks which it supports natively (https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/notebook.html), which IMO is a far-superior way of handling notebooks than Jupyter. (namely, the files are plain text so you can actually commit to Git without fuss)

I wrote a detailed blog post about the differences between Jupyter and R Notebooks years ago: https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/r-notebooks/

Re: Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices

#20

Post by st1x7 »

minimaxir wrote: post #19
st1x7 wrote: post #18

Sigh. I really think that the only reason notebooks are so popular is that Python never had a popular IDE with a high-quality REPL where people can learn to work interactively while writing code in plain text. R illustrates this very well - as an R user you can have your pick between RStudio, Jupyter and Rmarkdown and the overwhelming majority of users pick RStudio and notebooks are reserved only for a niche set of u…

You bring up RStudio but not the R Notebooks which it supports natively ( https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/notebook.html ), which IMO is a far-superior way of handling notebooks than Jupyter. (namely, the files are plain text so you can actually commit to Git without fuss) I wrote a detailed blog post about the differences between Jupyter and R Notebooks years ago: https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/r-notebooks/

Yes, what I meant by Rmarkdown is these notebooks.
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