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Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks

nbdev.fast.ai

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Re: Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks

#11

Post by enriquto »

I love working with notebooks but hate the .ipynb file format with the burning passion of a thousand suns.

For those of you who are similarly affected, you may want to try jupytext. It is a tiny package that converts threeway between ipynb, plain python files (whose comment blocks are interpreted as markdown cells) and plain markdown files (whose code blocks are interpreted as code cells). Moreover, if you have jupytext installed, then jupyter will read and write python and markdown files transparently as notebooks so that you don't need to deal with the stupid ipynb files anymore. This is nice because then you can track the evolution of notebooks easily in git, and your local graybeards can edit notebooks with a plain text editor, with no need of a web browser at all.

Of course, the output cells are not saved, but this was always in bad taste anyway. If you want a nice html with the cell outputs you can run "jupyter nbconvert --execute --to html" from the command line (and yes, it will work with plain python or markdown files if you have jupytext installed).

Why this is not part of jupyter proper is beyond me.

EDIT: regarding nbdev, I would like to learn what are the advantages with respect to the minuscule jupytext thing. I'm particularly concerned by the soundness of the quarto dependency, which is a scary behemoth made by accretion of haskell and javascript.

Re: Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks

#12

Post by ahurmazda »

enriquto wrote: post #11

I love working with notebooks but hate the .ipynb file format with the burning passion of a thousand suns. For those of you who are similarly affected, you may want to try jupytext. It is a tiny package that converts threeway between ipynb, plain python files (whose comment blocks are interpreted as markdown cells) and plain markdown files (whose code blocks are interpreted as code cells). Moreover, if you have jupyt…

+100

The fact that everyone I talk to agrees that this format sucks and then turns around and ask us to use yet another formatting tool (jupytext, nvcovert blah blah) is equally vexing.

Rmarkdown (+rstudio) has shown that one can have the cake and eat it too. Ironically, I prefer rstudio for doing exploratory coding with python. Hopefully their recent pivot to more-than-byond-R will save us from this .ipynb mess.

Re: Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks

#13

Post by tlarkworthy »

kayson wrote: post #5

I don't dislike notebooks, but I definitely have one foot in the "don't use notebooks for serious software" camp. I recently worked on a project where we're trying a notebook as the development platform for a data visualization report. The designer uses the notebook + bokeh to iterate on the report, and then we use nbconvert with some environment variables to create reports for different datasets. My biggest issue wi…

With observable notebooks you can install Sentry and run regular health checks. I recommend this as a step in productionization and made a notebook with embedded video on the topic https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/productionization?co...

Re: Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks

#14

Post by enriquto »

ahurmazda wrote: post #12
enriquto wrote: post #11

I love working with notebooks but hate the .ipynb file format with the burning passion of a thousand suns. For those of you who are similarly affected, you may want to try jupytext. It is a tiny package that converts threeway between ipynb, plain python files (whose comment blocks are interpreted as markdown cells) and plain markdown files (whose code blocks are interpreted as code cells). Moreover, if you have jupyt…

+100 The fact that everyone I talk to agrees that this format sucks and then turns around and ask us to use yet another formatting tool (jupytext, nvcovert blah blah) is equally vexing. Rmarkdown (+rstudio) has shown that one can have the cake and eat it too. Ironically, I prefer rstudio for doing exploratory coding with python. Hopefully their recent pivot to more-than-byond-R will save us from this .ipynb mess.

> [...] ask us to use yet another formatting tool (jupytext [...]

Heh. Notice that jupytext is not merely a file format converter. It is a plugin to jupyter that allows it to treat python and markdown files as notebooks. This works both for input and output, with transparent and idempotent round-trips. Once you have this plugin you don't see ipynb files ever again (unless for some bizarre reason you specifically save your notebooks into this format).

Re: Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks

#15

Post by Lucasoato »

hamelsmu wrote: post #6

Hamel here, one of the core developers on this project. I just want to say that we are really excited about this new release of nbdev and the added functionality it brings to users. The thing I'm most excited about is that you can use nbdev for more things than ever before, such as: Documenting existing codebases (even if they aren't written in nbdev), blog posts, books, presentations, etc. We also have an amazing no…

Jeremy Howard is definitely a visionary, his approach to ML, development and the learning process in general is revolutionary. It's people like him that can imbue passion to a young generation of Data practitioners.

Re: Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks

#16

Post by wodenokoto »

ahurmazda wrote: post #12
enriquto wrote: post #11

I love working with notebooks but hate the .ipynb file format with the burning passion of a thousand suns. For those of you who are similarly affected, you may want to try jupytext. It is a tiny package that converts threeway between ipynb, plain python files (whose comment blocks are interpreted as markdown cells) and plain markdown files (whose code blocks are interpreted as code cells). Moreover, if you have jupyt…

+100 The fact that everyone I talk to agrees that this format sucks and then turns around and ask us to use yet another formatting tool (jupytext, nvcovert blah blah) is equally vexing. Rmarkdown (+rstudio) has shown that one can have the cake and eat it too. Ironically, I prefer rstudio for doing exploratory coding with python. Hopefully their recent pivot to more-than-byond-R will save us from this .ipynb mess.

With the announcement of RStudio (the company) changing name I learned about the existence of qmd, which is sort of the next generation rmd.

It’s language agnostic (both in name but also cell meta data is yaml instead of r code) and the ecosystem around it already supports a lot of editors.

In defense of ipynb, I really do enjoy that code and output are together. The only place it isn’t nice is in git.

Re: Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks

#17

Post by nojito »

enriquto wrote: post #11

I love working with notebooks but hate the .ipynb file format with the burning passion of a thousand suns. For those of you who are similarly affected, you may want to try jupytext. It is a tiny package that converts threeway between ipynb, plain python files (whose comment blocks are interpreted as markdown cells) and plain markdown files (whose code blocks are interpreted as code cells). Moreover, if you have jupyt…

That’s the entire point of quarto.

https://quarto.org/

Re: Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks

#18

Post by Mochsner »

enriquto wrote: post #11

I love working with notebooks but hate the .ipynb file format with the burning passion of a thousand suns. For those of you who are similarly affected, you may want to try jupytext. It is a tiny package that converts threeway between ipynb, plain python files (whose comment blocks are interpreted as markdown cells) and plain markdown files (whose code blocks are interpreted as code cells). Moreover, if you have jupyt…

Ty for enlightening a jupyter novice (who never understood why people use them, given git garbage), on how to actually use notebooks with a team. Ive been manually moving everything between notebooks and other files

Re: Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks

#19

Post by mwexler »

wodenokoto wrote: post #16
ahurmazda wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+100 The fact that everyone I talk to agrees that this format sucks and then turns around and ask us to use yet another formatting tool (jupytext, nvcovert blah blah) is equally vexing. Rmarkdown (+rstudio) has shown that one can have the cake and eat it too. Ironically, I prefer rstudio for doing exploratory coding with python. Hopefully their recent pivot to more-than-byond-R will save us from this .ipynb mess.

With the announcement of RStudio (the company) changing name I learned about the existence of qmd, which is sort of the next generation rmd. It’s language agnostic (both in name but also cell meta data is yaml instead of r code) and the ecosystem around it already supports a lot of editors. In defense of ipynb, I really do enjoy that code and output are together. The only place it isn’t nice is in git.

I hadn't seen the name change yet.

Becoming to "Posit", see https://posit.co where they share their vision for their new future.

Re: Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks

#20

Post by ropeladder »

This looks great! I'm curious though if there are ways to get a bit more control over page layout. For example, can you put three charts on one page and have them resize appropriately? Or put two charts next to each other (without relying on the charting library itself)? This functionality is pretty important for our use case, but I've been assuming that notebook-style formats, when they output to pdfs or a printed page, are just going to output html that gets split up by the rendering engine.
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