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Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice

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Re: Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice

#91

I love notebooks as a way to present information, data, code and computations. However, I cannot stand typing any text into a web browser window. Is there any way to edit a jupyter notebook with a text editor and then run it in the browser? The native json is not really human-editable.

I have felt the same way in the past. There are some ways to do this, but none is great. Unfortunately using a text editor to put in the notebook text areas is not that straightforward because of security features in modern browsers. Since jupyter is actually a server (usually running locally) it's possible to communicate directly with it from a sufficiently advanced editor, but haven't seen any good execution of that idea. There's also the ipymd (https://github.com/rossant/ipymd) format, which is just markdown, and seems more or less what you want, but you lose the interactivity and display of images/plots/HTML/etc. Personally, I've found the "jupyter-vim-binding" (https://github.com/lambdalisue/jupyter-vim-binding) to be a relatively acceptable emulation of vim keybindings for the code editing.

Re: Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice

#93

The majority of the complaints I hear about notebooks I think come from a misunderstanding of what they're supposed to be. It's a mashup between a scientific paper and a repl. So it's useful for a bit of both: a) Just like with a paper, you can present scientific or mathematical ideas with accompanying visualizations or simulations. From the REPL side, as a bonus, you get interactivity, and the reader can pause and e…

If you ever have used an R Notebook written in R-Markdown, then its pretty easy to see why Jupyter Notebooks putting everything in JSON is just... infuriatingly wrong-headed. In an R Notebook, I can see my code, I can see my text, everything is exceedingly simple to understand, and I can edit it in any of the fantastic text editors out there (Jupyter's editor is not among them)

Re: Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice

#96
post #49

RStudio with using Rmarkdown is also popular. Both workflows are language agnostic.

Putting aside the R vs Python question (as as noted in this thread, you can use R in a Jupyter notebook and Python in an RMarkdown notebook), I much prefer RMarkdown notebooks. RMarkdown notebooks are plain text, so you can read them easily in any text editor (which also means they play well with git, unlike Jupyter notebooks). And it's meant to work with the RStudio IDE, so I get a much more seamless experience goin…

Using markdown for python notebooks makes so much sense. What was the thinking behind encoding everything inside JSON?

Re: Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice

#97
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey There! I'm trying to solve the issue of IntelliSense.. I'm building/improving Jupyter Notebooks inside VSCode: https://github.com/pavanagrawal123/VSNotebooks . It's a fork from another extension somebody already built, but all activity is dead, so I'm starting up dev on an active fork. I'd love to hear any feedback y'all have! :) Also planning to add some nice debug features, plus hopefully integration into the i…

How do you see the idea of a vs code notebook comparing to or being different from the goals of the hydrogen editor?

To me, my favorite part of the design of Hydrogen is that it's entirely language agnostic, and can be used with _any_ Jupyter kernel.

Re: Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice

#98

The majority of the complaints I hear about notebooks I think come from a misunderstanding of what they're supposed to be. It's a mashup between a scientific paper and a repl. So it's useful for a bit of both: a) Just like with a paper, you can present scientific or mathematical ideas with accompanying visualizations or simulations. From the REPL side, as a bonus, you get interactivity, and the reader can pause and e…

If you ever have used an R Notebook written in R-Markdown, then its pretty easy to see why Jupyter Notebooks putting everything in JSON is just... infuriatingly wrong-headed. In an R Notebook, I can see my code, I can see my text, everything is exceedingly simple to understand, and I can edit it in any of the fantastic text editors out there (Jupyter's editor is not among them)

YES! R Notebook is so much better in my opinion than Jupyter. I definitely prefer to work with a simple format verses JSON for this kind of work.

Re: Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice

#99

I kind of find Jupyter an indictment of other coding tools really, it's 2018 and they're normally kind of weak or kind of unprogrammable. Feel like we're waiting for someone to really reinvent Emacs, preferably using web tech. Most editors can't open a terminal that you can use VIM keybindings on to search/navigate history and treate like any other buffer. VSCode -> not currently possible because they wrote it in a r…

I use Jupyter in emacs: ein-mode. The whole concept of programming in a browser sounds bizarre to me. I have a tool that's designed for programming (emacs) and a tool that's designed for streaming cat videos (firefox) and I use the latter for programming? Thanks but no thanks. Ime emacs works pretty perfect with jupyter too, there is no need to use firefox for something it's not designed to do for my full-time job.

I have also tried ein-mode, and sometimes use it. I haven't used it enough to have a super educated opinion but it didn't blow me away.

I don't think it supports cell folding (?) as an example missing feature

Minor point but it also can't/shouldn't support widgets, which we use at work. Any extension to jupyter is going to be written in javascript so there's an element I'd be locking myself out of the ecosystem.

I didn't mean this as a criticism of emacs, my post said that the best thing I know is emacs, just that it's (probably) not the future of editors imo so I'm reluctant to throw 100 hours into it.

Re: Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice

#100

Here are the issues with Jupyter, and most other flavor, of notebook: 1. variables have to be explicitly output The most important tool for programming, for me, is that window that shows you the current state of all the variables. When I step through a program, I look at the state. 90% of my debugging solutions come from seeing that variable doesn't have the right state. 2. Intellisense For the love of god, I do not…

Re #1: There's a plugin in nbextensions that shows variable values a la spyder.
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