It 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…
Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
71–80 of 92 posts
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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.
Apart from the fact that some areas of physics are really at the forefront of maths, this also ignores the fact that learning the level of proficiency required for graduate work in physics is significantly more involved than learning about some best practices in programming.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#73Note 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/
Streamlit is great for demos but not for building a product.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's because they are not programmers. Beginners not being aware of some best practices doesn't automatically make them not-programmers. I work as a data scientist and I see it as part of software development. It's just a different domain - some people do front-end, some do mobile or embedded, I do data science.
Data scientists are not programmers. They are data scientists. Just like I'm not a data scientists, I'm a programmer. Now, I can use pandas in a pinch and makes pretty graphs, but my statistical analysis will never be on part with yours. Just like a pianist hobbyist will have a hard time to rival somebody who does that 40 hours a week, although he may be able to play a few fantastic pieces. Hell, even a web dev progr…
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I think you are seriously overestimating the "programming proficiency" of many scientists. I don't think the OP meant that scientists should be experts in the web stack or even in the intricate details of the scientific stack. However, I do expect that they should know how to write reasonable maintainable code, i.e. use functions, modules, don't just copy paste code around between cells etc.. (this is seriously the s…
I've seen data scientists handling big code bases. The problem was not they couldn't use the language features. The problem is that they would be always lacking essential information for their mission because their is not enough time in a day for a regular human being.
They would put a md5 hashed password in their db, create an xml format to be reusable only to realize they'll need to hard code some value later, or have a gunicorn running to a crawl because they didn't know how to calibrate the number of workers.
It's just too many things to know. Once they mastered that, other things would come to bite them.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe they are not programmers but they surely work in a team or company where everybody is supposed to work as efficiently as possible together. Simply throwing your unstructured and unreadable code over the wall, with the excuse that it's not your key responsibility so somebody else should fix it, is just bad. It doesn't mean of course that everybody is supposed to be an expert programmer, but a minimum effort to h…
It's not a matter of responsability or will, but of ability. Expecting a fish to fly is a very bad working relationship.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
This could cost anywhere from nothing (e.g. free) to 3-figures (in USD) depending on the specifics. How many users are accessing the notebooks concurrently (e.g. all 1000 or only a dozen at a given time)? Is there any downtime, i.e. do the users come from the same time zone, so that app can have inactive hours (say it's OK to be unreachable during the night)? Depending on the specifics, free hosting may be available…
We run a non-profit minimal-budget workshop where currently hundreds of people work together at the same time, but they run code on their own computer. But making people install Jupyter and other python packages on their computer is difficult. So we are exploring the possibility of the hosting the notebooks ourselves. We don't want options like Google Colab, because we want the experience to be tightly integrated (th…
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Streamlit is great for demos but not for building a product.
Notebooks aren't great for building a product, either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19859913
As a note to OP, messaging your solution as “turn your notebook into an app” may not be optimal — you will loose many who abhor working in notebooks.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Streamlit is great for demos but not for building a product.
Notebooks aren't great for building a product, either.
Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Streamlit is great for demos but not for building a product.
Just trying it out now, but why is it not good for products?