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I always hated notebooks personally as I found them clunky and inefficient, but never wanted to yuck someone else’s yum. Then I started mentoring a junior staf
by subjectsigma 2y ago
I always hated notebooks personally as I found them clunky and inefficient, but never wanted to yuck someone else’s yum.
Then I started mentoring a junior staff member who worked on another project. The lead of that project was a physicist who wrote primarily in Jupyter notebooks. Like, thousands and thousands of lines of code. This junior staff member spent like 90% of her time confused and copying-and-pasting between notebooks. She had no idea what a virtual environment was and her go-to solution for solving import errors was to nuke and re-download the repo and re-run the setup script, or create a new notebook from scratch containing all the prerequisite user functions.
Was top 10 most horrifying things I’ve ever seen. I advised her immediately to stop using notebooks for development and sent her a few Python tutorials. Luckily though she just left the project and got on a better one instead.
- ahmadmijot 2y agoThis is why spaghetti code is so prevalent in scientific community. We are not really train (especially for non engineering research projects) to become programmers and we do programming just as a way to do research.