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I think it speaks to people's desire for a quick and easy to set up basic GUI creator with an editor that allows inline code editing, and no need to deal explic
by jrumbut 8y ago
I think it speaks to people's desire for a quick and easy to set up basic GUI creator with an editor that allows inline code editing, and no need to deal explicitly with the client server interaction.
I myself, as someone who likes to create really solid and maintainable tools, have fallen into the notebook trap and written things like "change the month in cell 22 then execute cells 1 through 3 and 20 through 27 to update the report".
The notebook format was great for prototyping what was really a small app. You don't really have those problems when you're just generating a document.
- Immortalin 8y agoYes. It's called Microsoft Excel. Software engineers don't like VB for the same reason they don't like Python-in-a-notebook but you cannot deny its effectiveness.
- jrumbut 8y agoYou're right about what excel is (and the whole VB ecosystem for that matter), but I think the critical difference is that the language and environment are very different. If I know the smallest amount of python (or R) I can leverage Jupyter notebooks and it is intuitive. To really get something great out of excel you have to learn excel. I think that difference is almost as important as the excel stigma.
- taeric 8y agoInterestingly, excel has the advantage that the data has to always be visible. This is also a disadvantage, because it can't work with too much data. My gut is that the amount of data it can work with more than compensates for the disadvantage.