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The advantage I see with Jupyter is that at least there's a path from the notebook to a proper programming language. Excel macros live in Excel and are tied to

The advantage I see with Jupyter is that at least there's a path from the notebook to a proper programming language. Excel macros live in Excel and are tied to the sheets in a particular workbook. Pandas / Matplotlib / Jupyter lets you turn your exploratory analysis history into a script that runs outside of Jupyter. That's a huge advantage -- schedule it to run at 5am for your 6am meeting, and you can come in to work half an hour later! Excel macros can do this, but because they rely on the interaction between formula evaluation and procedural code, it's such a headache in comparison that it's much less likely to be worth it. Overwrite the wrong cell and the whole thing falls apart. I'll take the Python world any day.

taeric 9y ago
Sadly, I'm cynical enough to think that just because there is a path, doesn't mean it is encouraged or used. In fact, most of the excitement seems to be about doubling down on the Jupyter infrastructure so that you can have "executable notebooks." I don't know why that bothers me, but it definitely does.
- sevensor 9y ago
  > I don't know why that bothers me, but it definitely does. It bothers me, and I can tell you why! Between pandas and matplotlib, the royal road to liberation from routine analysis tasks is paved with Python scripts. Jupyter has an important ancillary role in aiding discovery. But this whole notion of "executable notebooks" seems designed to keep people in bondage to fragile workflows based on capturing and replaying user input. It caters to the least common denominator, to the one person on the team who can't be trusted to read things. I'm infuriated on behalf of anybody subjected to such foolishness.
  - taeric 9y ago
    I was really hoping someone would give a counter argument to this. Do you know of any common "devil's advocates" in this vein?
    - sevensor 9y ago
      No, but I'd like to see them too. The closest I can come is what the now-retired Jupyter Dashboards project had to say: http://jupyter-dashboards-layout.readthedocs.io/en/latest/use-cases.html http://jupyter-dashboards-layout.readthedocs.io/en/latest/us... > Alice is a Jupyter Notebook user. Alice prototypes data access, modeling, plotting, interactivity, etc. in a notebook. Now Alice needs to deliver a dynamic dashboard for non-notebook users. Today, Alice must step outside Jupyter Notebook and build a separate web application. Alice cannot directly transform her notebook into a secure, standalone dashboard application. I find this pretty unconvincing. The gap between "stuff I did in a notebook" and a secure, let alone correct, application is nontrivial. There's no way for Alice to do this without learning to write computer programs for real. And if she does that, she'll find that it's a lot easier when you don't pull in a huge dependency like Jupyter.

taeric 9y ago

Sadly, I'm cynical enough to think that just because there is a path, doesn't mean it is encouraged or used. In fact, most of the excitement seems to be about doubling down on the Jupyter infrastructure so that you can have "executable notebooks." I don't know why that bothers me, but it definitely does.

sevensor 9y ago
> I don't know why that bothers me, but it definitely does. It bothers me, and I can tell you why! Between pandas and matplotlib, the royal road to liberation from routine analysis tasks is paved with Python scripts. Jupyter has an important ancillary role in aiding discovery. But this whole notion of "executable notebooks" seems designed to keep people in bondage to fragile workflows based on capturing and replaying user input. It caters to the least common denominator, to the one person on the team who can't be trusted to read things. I'm infuriated on behalf of anybody subjected to such foolishness.
- taeric 9y ago
  I was really hoping someone would give a counter argument to this. Do you know of any common "devil's advocates" in this vein?
  - sevensor 9y ago
    No, but I'd like to see them too. The closest I can come is what the now-retired Jupyter Dashboards project had to say: http://jupyter-dashboards-layout.readthedocs.io/en/latest/use-cases.html http://jupyter-dashboards-layout.readthedocs.io/en/latest/us... > Alice is a Jupyter Notebook user. Alice prototypes data access, modeling, plotting, interactivity, etc. in a notebook. Now Alice needs to deliver a dynamic dashboard for non-notebook users. Today, Alice must step outside Jupyter Notebook and build a separate web application. Alice cannot directly transform her notebook into a secure, standalone dashboard application. I find this pretty unconvincing. The gap between "stuff I did in a notebook" and a secure, let alone correct, application is nontrivial. There's no way for Alice to do this without learning to write computer programs for real. And if she does that, she'll find that it's a lot easier when you don't pull in a huge dependency like Jupyter.