4 ms·
As with so many things python related (including python itself), I am perplexed by how willing people seem to be to fall in love with solutions that have so man
by zmmmmm 8y ago
As with so many things python related (including python itself), I am perplexed by how willing people seem to be to fall in love with solutions that have so many limitations and problems. I find Jupyter just barely usable. I constantly have issues with editing in the cells, diagrams not sizing correctly, cells accidentally displaying huge amounts of data and freezing my browser, complete failure of autocompletion in many languages, a very awkward security model involving manual cutting and pasting of auth tokens around, nearly impossible to get a reasonable rendering of the notebook into something reasonable like PDF (yes there attempts at solutions, they are full of problems). Many limitations derive directly from the architecture where the kernels are limited in what they can do because specific parts have to be interpreted in the browser that are language specific.
From my perspective, it's a dumpster fire - in 2018 there should be something so much better than this. RStudio is a thousand times better but only does R. I used to like Beaker Notebook but it gave up due to Jupyter's popularity and converted itself into a bunch of Jupyter extensions which now have all of Jupyter's limitations.
Yet despite all this I can see that there's this enormous community that loves this and keeps developing and contributing to it.
- stult 8y agoI love everything about RStudio, except for all the R stuff.
- gaius 8y agoit's a dumpster fire - in 2018 there should be something so much better than this In 1998 I was using a tool called MathCAD that provided a notebook interface running as a plugin to MS Word. In 2018, Jupyter is still not as good as that. Some things are just not meant to be webpages.
- newen 8y agoI like jupyter and use it all the time mostly because I can log what I do for future reference. But I have to work around it so much stuff it can get really annoying sometimes. Yeah, compared to the Matlab IDE and how easy it is to use, it's not even close. But it's an open source project, so people tend to find it awkward to criticize it a lot (I mean, that sentiment is justified since it's mostly volunteer work but sometimes it can get to be too much).
- narwally 8y agoI feel the same way, especially as an emacs user. Org-babel seems to be a superior implementation of the same idea. Org is just a text document, so git and git diffs work. I can use any combination of languages I want in a document and have them running in different sessions. And best of all I can edit code blocks using my customized major mode for that language. On top of that you get all the goodness that comes with org-mode, not least of which is the ability export it to dozens of other human readable formats for easy sharing. I think there's even an exporter for jupyter notebooks (there's at least one for ipython notebooks).
- brians 8y agoI expect jupyter notebooks to keep an environment consistent between cells. Org-Babel doesn’t generally do this. A Good notebook environment is more like a lisp buffer with block comments.
- kristjansson 8y agoOrg Babel source blocks can take a session property to main consistent environment(s) across code blocks. The session property can also be set as a language specific file-level property eg: https://orgmode.org/manual/Header-arguments-in-Org-mode-properties.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Header-arguments-in-Org-mode-prop...
- red-tea 8y agoWhy should there be something better? Just because you want it? Someone has to make it.
- jamesb93 8y agoAs soon as a git repo involves jupyter notebooks I move on. They're ugly, they don't let me learn how the code works properly and in general looks awful. Why not just give me some code to run??