2 ms·

it sounds like the ideal solution would be something functional (so you have a computation graph), pure (so you can cache results) and lazy (so order of express

it sounds like the ideal solution would be something functional (so you have a computation graph), pure (so you can cache results) and lazy (so order of expressions doesn't matter.) why not Haskell? or even a pure/lazy subset/variant of Julia, if you want to ditch the baggage of Haskell's type bondage? you could ditch explicit cells entirely, and implement your "scope" by selecting a (sub)expression and spying on the inputs/outputs.

tonyarkles 2y ago
I've thought about that and have written some fun Haskell code in the past but... the other goal is to actually have users :D. I've also considered Lisp, Scheme, and friends to have really easily parseable ASTs. I jest a bit, but there's a very rich ecosystem of really useful data analysis libraries with Python that do somewhat exist in other ecosystems (R, Julia, etc) but aren't nearly as... I would use the word polish, but a lot of the Python libraries have sharp edges as well. Well trodden might be a better word. My experience with doing heavy data analysis with Python and Julia is that both of them are often going to require some Googling to understand a weird pattern to accomplish something effectively but there's a much higher probability that you're going to find the answer quickly with Python. I also don't really want to reinvent the universe on the first go. It has occurred to me that it might be possible to do this in a style similar to org-mode though where it actually doesn't care what the underlying language is and you could just weave a bunch of languages together. Rust code interfacing with some hardware, C++ doing the Kalman filter, Python (via geopandas) doing geospatial computation, and R (via ggplot2) rendering the output. There's a data marshalling issue there of course, which I've also not spent too many cycles thinking about yet :) Edit: I did copy and paste your comment into my notebook for chewing on while I'm travelling this weekend. Thanks for riffing with me!
smw 2y ago
Elixir livebook does this
- tonyarkles 2y ago
  Interesting! I do love Elixir! Thanks for the recommendation, I'll take a look!

tonyarkles 2y ago

I've thought about that and have written some fun Haskell code in the past but... the other goal is to actually have users :D. I've also considered Lisp, Scheme, and friends to have really easily parseable ASTs. I jest a bit, but there's a very rich ecosystem of really useful data analysis libraries with Python that do somewhat exist in other ecosystems (R, Julia, etc) but aren't nearly as... I would use the word polish, but a lot of the Python libraries have sharp edges as well. Well trodden might be a better word. My experience with doing heavy data analysis with Python and Julia is that both of them are often going to require some Googling to understand a weird pattern to accomplish something effectively but there's a much higher probability that you're going to find the answer quickly with Python. I also don't really want to reinvent the universe on the first go. It has occurred to me that it might be possible to do this in a style similar to org-mode though where it actually doesn't care what the underlying language is and you could just weave a bunch of languages together. Rust code interfacing with some hardware, C++ doing the Kalman filter, Python (via geopandas) doing geospatial computation, and R (via ggplot2) rendering the output. There's a data marshalling issue there of course, which I've also not spent too many cycles thinking about yet :) Edit: I did copy and paste your comment into my notebook for chewing on while I'm travelling this weekend. Thanks for riffing with me!

smw 2y ago

Elixir livebook does this

tonyarkles 2y ago
Interesting! I do love Elixir! Thanks for the recommendation, I'll take a look!