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I have tought Python with notebooks to scientists and we always emphasize the pipeline: Play with your code in the notebook, when you know what the right way t

I have tought Python with notebooks to scientists and we always emphasize the pipeline: Play with your code in the notebook, when you know what the right way to split it is, turn cells into functions. When you have a decent body of functions turn them into a module. Notebooks excel as ad hoc interfaces to libraries and modules. They don't replace them. I'm not sure the problems with scientists' code are enabled by notebooks to a significant degree. We used to exclusively use PyCharm and I was still debugging spaghetti scripts with massive global state interacting in weird ways. Notebooks give people more foot-guns with hidden state. I think they are neutral when it comes to modularity. And I think they are a positive for encouraging documentation.

analog31 8y ago
This seems like a decent progression for easing beginners into the basics of good programming practices. It's certainly not a Jupyter problem per se. I went through a similar progression when I learned BASIC in high school, in 1981. Projects grow to a size where they become unmanageable without some structure. In my view, the importance of documentation is huge. I've been programming for a long time. I don't write software. I use programming as a problem solving tool. Jupyter has made a profound difference in my ability to pick up work that I did a month ago, or years ago, and figure out what I did, mistakes and all. For me it's more about reproducible problem solving than software development.
- XorNot 8y ago
  Notebooks for me were something I found after iPython Qt console, when I was getting frustrated at how hard it was to replay a set of scripts to get back to my state. I always view them as an execute in order abstraction. I suspect what we really need to improve them is a subset of python which only deals in immutable data structures somehow - and then let notebooks branch off that immutable state but still be "execute forward" only.

analog31 8y ago

This seems like a decent progression for easing beginners into the basics of good programming practices. It's certainly not a Jupyter problem per se. I went through a similar progression when I learned BASIC in high school, in 1981. Projects grow to a size where they become unmanageable without some structure. In my view, the importance of documentation is huge. I've been programming for a long time. I don't write software. I use programming as a problem solving tool. Jupyter has made a profound difference in my ability to pick up work that I did a month ago, or years ago, and figure out what I did, mistakes and all. For me it's more about reproducible problem solving than software development.

XorNot 8y ago
Notebooks for me were something I found after iPython Qt console, when I was getting frustrated at how hard it was to replay a set of scripts to get back to my state. I always view them as an execute in order abstraction. I suspect what we really need to improve them is a subset of python which only deals in immutable data structures somehow - and then let notebooks branch off that immutable state but still be "execute forward" only.