It's absolutely hilarious that the author opens with an image of Socrates.
Socrates, as you recall, famously argued that writing was a detriment to thinking. The parallel that notebooks are a sign of lazy thought does not go unnoticed.
Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code
71–80 of 153 posts
Re: Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code
#72I think people may be misusing notebooks. They aren't there to develop software but serve as virtual versions of scientific notebooks (hence the name). They are there to conduct experiments (changing parameters and the like in your code) and to record and plot the results. You don't have to develop the software itself in the notebook.
It's just a name, you're overthinking it.
Re: Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code
#73I try to avoid Jupyter related things. Every time I encounter them, it seems worse. Point in case, an open issue from 2017 requesting "copy/paste" be (re)added to the right-click context menu, still open.
Re: Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code
#74I'm an embedded person, so clueless on this stuff. Are notebooks really used in prod? Outside of applications where notebooks are specifically useful to the goal of the system, ie. documentation,blog posts,textbooks with interactive/data driven elements? How would this even work? Can an ipynb file be mechanized in the same way a py file can?
I think the issue actually goes beyond notebooks. It's just that notebooks are the method du jour for creating hacked-together code. But regardless of the tool chosen, hacked-together code does eventually leak into production. Mine has.
It's harder to breach that barrier in embedded, because someone has to approve of getting the hardware made.
In most organizations, there's a kind of no mans land between hacked code, and professionally written software. That's because the real SWE's are always overbooked, and for good reasons -- business and career wise -- should be working on the biggest projects. This leaves software needs that are urgent for somebody but not urgent enough to rise to the top of the priority list for the software team. The somebody could be an internal or external customer.
Re: Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code
#75>Same with notebooks, you can write NASA-production-grade software in a notebook, but most likely you won't. One of my family members literally maintains a software platform for test bedding production NASA spacecraft at JPL and it is all on top of Jupyter notebooks. People are literally on course to build AGI and there’s a good chance that large portions of that work will be done within Jupyter notebooks. To suggest…
> People are literally on course to build AGI
Citation needed.
Re: Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code
#76Recently, since coming across FastAI and nbdev[0], I've been moving increasingly to a more notebook-centric flow. So far it's been better particularly for the exploration aspect where I've primarily used ptpython in the past (and this isn't anywhere ML-related). I think the idea behind nbdev is pretty neat, but it pushes some practices that I'm not a fan of at all. I want to get to the point where I have a mostly complete IDE experience in the notebook so I don't have to keep switching back and forth. I have a ways to go.
Re: Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code
#77Notebooks are a diluted form of the Lisp/Smalltalk REPL-based development experience, with some features from the reactive-spreadsheet world. Especially for those of us in the business of producing numbers, 'real code' with a fixed set of tests isn't a better way but a necessary evil, a black box that we can't really trust. Building a calculation piece by piece, in a notebook, trying out variations along the way? Tha…
I wonder why CL and Smalltalk haven’t beat Python. Is is the languages or just unawareness? The workflow just make more sense there with better updates propagation and state saving.
Re: Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
REPL stands for Read–eval–print loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read%E2%80%93eval%E2%80%93prin... A REPL, by its name, is a very narrow version of the broader paradigm of interactive computer programming environments. But Notebooks are not REPLs, unless you use REPL to mean "interactive programming environment" and not REPL. Notebooks are much broader than a REPL! In a notebook, you can go back and edit and run in…
"In a notebook, you can go back and edit and run individual lines of the notebook without re-running the whole notebook from the start and without re-computing everything that depends on what you just edited." Isn't this a standard on REPLs as well? You can select the code you wish to run, and press Ctrl+Enter or what ever. I must admit, I've programmed Python for about 10 years in Spyder and VS Code now, but I haven…
> Isn't this a standard on REPLs as well? You can select the code you wish to run, and press Ctrl+Enter or what ever.
Not usually, no. Type `python` at the command prompt - what you get is a REPL. Type `clisp` at the command prompt, or `wish`, or `psql`, or `perl` or even `bash` - those are al REPLs.
Very different to a program that presents an editor, and then lets the user selectively choose which lines/expressions in that editor to run next. For example, type `emacs somefile.sql` in the command prompt. The application that opens is most definitely not a READ-EVAL-PRINT-LOOP.
Re: Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code
#79[deleted]
Re: Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code
#80>Same with notebooks, you can write NASA-production-grade software in a notebook, but most likely you won't. One of my family members literally maintains a software platform for test bedding production NASA spacecraft at JPL and it is all on top of Jupyter notebooks. People are literally on course to build AGI and there’s a good chance that large portions of that work will be done within Jupyter notebooks. To suggest…
> People are literally on course to build AGI Citation needed.
I will bet you that said citation (the important one you’re holding out for) will have an accompanying Jupyter notebook when it’s ready