Would it be crazy to add Viola: to the title of this sub?
Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
31–40 of 92 posts
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#32It seems this is doing round trips to the server to do the calculations? I often think that with the current state of Javascript in the browser, we could build an awesome, super fast, Jupyter style notebook software that runs completely in the browser. With the modules implemented as native Javascript modules which are dynamically loaded. Is anybody working on this? I have built a rough version of this idea for mysel…
Observable notebooks exist. The issue for JS replacing Jupyter is that Python already has a large number of scientific libraries where the performant ones are based on wrapping C++ or Fortran code. You can handle more data and processing on the server. Also, because Jupyter gives you shell access and other languages like R can make use of it.
Language-wise, the other issue JS has is that it lacks operator overloading, which makes array handling a lot nicer. Python has magic methods for doing that. Julia, R and Matlab have that built into their languages. Julia also has it's own version of reactive notebooks similar to Observable.
And then you have a lot of scientists who already know and use Python, R or Julia. I can't really imagine a statistician who's well versed in R finding much value in JS. Javascript just isn't made for complex statistics the way R is.
JS now feels like Java back at the turn of the millennium, when people were thinking Java could just be used for everything, and it sort of was. Or any language could run on the JVM (the web has largely replaced that idea). But there's a reason for the various different programming languages. Some are just better at doing certain things. And JS is not a scientific computing language.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Scientists are not meant to create code that ends up on production. You might be mixing up the terms. I don't think that the point was about "scientists" in general, it was about "data scientists". The first is a common term used to describe someone who does science in some professional capacity. The second one is a very broad job title within software which very often includes writing code that ends up in producti…
Even among devs with very close speciality, the difference in productivity is immense. Take a iOS team, make them dev a MacOS desktop app, and see their output plummet in their of productivity or quality. They will end up doing a good job, but it will take between 6 months and a year to catch up with a specialized team. A data scientist is not even a somebody trained as a programmer. Their strong suit is data analysi…
> But I as a Python trainer, I train data analyst regularly, and they don't have a clue about language ecosystems, how the OS work, data formats or reliable software architecture.
This is like teaching some JavaScript to complete beginners at a bootcamp and then declaring that front-end developers aren't real programmers because they know so little.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#34Would it be crazy to add Viola: to the title of this sub?
> Would it be crazy to add Viola: to the title of this sub?
Yes, because it's called "Voilà" :-)
But I agree, starting the title with "Turns" is pretty bizarre.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree, many, many scientists hire a professional statistician to do the stats for their papers. Similarly, they should hire experienced, qualified software engineers to write/check the software in their papers. They don't because 'everyone can code - its just logic'.
Err... That's kinda my point ?
Mea culpa - I interpreted your comment to mean: only once its ready to go into industrial use.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#36Tried their example link: "Problem: package xeus-cling-0.12.0-h5a79028_0 requires xtl >=0.7.0, sigh I don't know when it started, but it seems to be a recent trend to add dependencies for anything and to package everything on demand. It's probably for security or something. But I do miss the days when people would link a static binary that "just works" even without internet and that'll keep working a week later, beca…
Python projects around jupyter, pandas etc. seem especially bad at making reproducible environments. They lock to versions that don't work very well, only work with specific versions of Python (without documenting it)...
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because they are not programmers. One should not expect them to be experts in 2 fields. They do their work with the tool provided, and if we want a better output, we need to provide better tooling or accept what comes out. I want my physicists to spend their mental effort on physics, not on software architecture.
As a scientist myself, I strongly disagree. If you spend a non-negligible amount of your time telling a computer what to do, you are, indeed, a programmer. And as such you should be expected to become a decently proficient programmer. Physicists are not mathematicians, and yet they are required to acquire a relatively high degree of proficiency in maths because maths is a fundamental tool in their job, and nobody wou…
> If you spend a non-negligible amount of your time telling a computer what to do, you are, indeed, a programmer. And as such you should be expected to become a decently proficient programmer.
Just like if you are standing on your two legs most of the day and sprint once in a while, you can be considered a runner. Sure, you can play with semantics, but most people cannot run a marathon.
> The attitude of considering programming a mundane craft to be picked up as-you-go is the main reason why the scientific software landscape is such a shitshow.
Err... That's kinda my point?
> And as such you should be expected to become a decently proficient programmer.
It's very, very hard to be good in 2 different fields. Most people won't have the ability or the context to do so. Even if they did, the time and energy spent to do so would be taken from their main activity, which is why we employ them in the first place.
It's not reasonable to ask a data scientist, geographer, biologist or physicist to follow up with the right practices to deploy the latest sci-stack on a linux server, understand the trade off between GIL locked python thread, asyncio and multiprocessing or spell out what WSGI stands for.
Hell, I know a lot of professional programmers that don't know those things
> Physicists are not mathematicians, and yet they are required to acquire a relatively high degree of proficiency in maths
The quantity of information required to be learned is of one or two orders of magnitude, because the field of maths required to perform physics is quite stable, and well understood.
IT is a very young field, in constant flux. The scientific stack is a moving target, not to even mention the web one. Nobody can expect them to understand python, numpy, pandas, then a web framework, then css, then js, and html, probably some frameworks for them, a builder or two, how to deploy all that stuff in dev, in prod and architectural concerns for linking all that stuff.
That's crazy talk.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even among devs with very close speciality, the difference in productivity is immense. Take a iOS team, make them dev a MacOS desktop app, and see their output plummet in their of productivity or quality. They will end up doing a good job, but it will take between 6 months and a year to catch up with a specialized team. A data scientist is not even a somebody trained as a programmer. Their strong suit is data analysi…
> But I as a Python trainer, I train data analyst regularly, and they don't have a clue about language ecosystems, how the OS work, data formats or reliable software architecture. This is like teaching some JavaScript to complete beginners at a bootcamp and then declaring that front-end developers aren't real programmers because they know so little.
Oh no, I train frontend developers, and they know a lot more than data scientists when it's about programming.
I'm not talking about complete beginners. I don't train beginners.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#39Note that there's also streamlit [1]. It uses regular python files, rather than notebooks, so they can be easily version controlled. And it has more UI tools. [1]: https://streamlit.io/
This is great. I've been looking for the equivalent of RShiny in the python world and never heard of streamlit before
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#40Note that there's also streamlit [1]. It uses regular python files, rather than notebooks, so they can be easily version controlled. And it has more UI tools. [1]: https://streamlit.io/
Exceptionally strong recommendation for streamlit from me.
I can create a GUI for a tool that looks nice faster than I can make a CLI. I've built useful production systems (ok, sure, for internal use) in literally minutes.
You're a bit limited in what kinds of apps you can make but the tradeoffs it makes here means that it's astoundingly easy to make a wide range of very useful tools.