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No that's not the reason - or at least, not for everyone. I created nbdev. I've been coding for over 30 years, and spent over 10 years using R and S-PLUS. I've
by jph00 6y ago
No that's not the reason - or at least, not for everyone. I created nbdev. I've been coding for over 30 years, and spent over 10 years using R and S-PLUS. I've used Delphi, Visual Studio, Emacs, vim, vscode, and many other editors and IDEs, including many with integrated line-oriented REPLs.
There's a big difference between a line-oriented plain text REPL, and a Mathematica/Jupyter-style notebook REPL, especially when you want to mix and match your charts, image outputs, rich table outputs, interactive JS outputs, and so forth. Also, for experimentation, where you want to go back and change things to see what happens (e.g. very common in data science) I find it much easier and more understandable in a notebook.
I have a video where I show the difference between these styles of working in some detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q6sLbz37gk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q6sLbz37gk
- sbelskie 6y agoYea, I don't really get what repls have to do with what notebooks offer. They are similar-ish, obviously, but they accommodate different workflows and use cases.
- st1x7 6y agoThat's getting to my point though - they should accommodate different workflows and use cases. But what's happening instead is that people are overusing notebooks in cases where plain text + REPL is more appropriate.
- sbelskie 6y agoThat makes sense as a possible situation. I’m just not sure that it’s one that’s familiar to me. I can’t honestly say I have my finger on the pulse of where people are using notebooks vs repls but the former seem really great for 1) step by step examples 2) scripts-in-progress where certain steps are more in flux than others. Though, I think I get what you mean as I reflect on my own dev experience. As a mainly C# dev which has a very very limited repl experience (I would and should say no repl experience but someone will yell at me about csi.exe or dotnet-script) I have seen people using notebooks for want of a good repl, but I’m curious why anyone writing python would.
- fulafel 6y agoPeople mean different things by REPL - the nicer Lisps had richer reader prompts that were not totally text bsaed, could show you graphical stuff and accept commands other than just source code, have interactive features etc - see eg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Listener.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Listener... or some youtube videos of Lisp machines.