3 ms·

What type of work would you do with that? Are there any libraries available for real data analysis with JavaScript?

by jchendy 13y ago

mistercow 13y ago
There are a few rather immature ones, but you can do a lot more with a notebook than just data analysis. I often need to do calculations involving many parameters, and there are three important considerations I usually have to deal with: 1. I'm probably going to want to tweak the parameters. 2. The calculation is going to be difficult to express as a succinct equation. 3. I may want to look back over the result later. Using an ordinary calculator is cumbersome because of 1 and 2, and doesn't satisfy 3. AN alternative is to use an ordinary interactive shell to put everything together, which helps with 2, but still makes for a lot of work on 1 and doesn't fix 3. Writing a whole program to do the calculation is an improvement because it fixes 1 and 2, and it helps with 3 because I can leave myself lots of comments. I've found literate CoffeeScript to be very effective here (you can even turn it into a nice webpage to share your math with others), but there are still some drawbacks. The results are not interleaved with the code, so when I look back over it, it's not easy to check my work and debug. The workflow also leaves a bit to be desired. You can't, for example, quickly play with a small snippet as you're working through your thoughts. A notebook, on the other hand, elegantly handles all of these considerations. I can use markdown to create a nice article for my future self explaining all of my calculations, have comments, code, and results all next to each other, and tweak parameters on the fly. Yet I still find myself using literate CoffeeScript instead. And the main reason for that is that whenever I use Python, I constantly wish that I was using CoffeeScript instead.

3 ms·

What type of work would you do with that? Are there any libraries available for real data analysis with JavaScript?

by jchendy 13y ago

What type of work would you do with that? Are there any libraries available for real data analysis with JavaScript?

mistercow 13y ago
There are a few rather immature ones, but you can do a lot more with a notebook than just data analysis. I often need to do calculations involving many parameters, and there are three important considerations I usually have to deal with: 1. I'm probably going to want to tweak the parameters. 2. The calculation is going to be difficult to express as a succinct equation. 3. I may want to look back over the result later. Using an ordinary calculator is cumbersome because of 1 and 2, and doesn't satisfy 3. AN alternative is to use an ordinary interactive shell to put everything together, which helps with 2, but still makes for a lot of work on 1 and doesn't fix 3. Writing a whole program to do the calculation is an improvement because it fixes 1 and 2, and it helps with 3 because I can leave myself lots of comments. I've found literate CoffeeScript to be very effective here (you can even turn it into a nice webpage to share your math with others), but there are still some drawbacks. The results are not interleaved with the code, so when I look back over it, it's not easy to check my work and debug. The workflow also leaves a bit to be desired. You can't, for example, quickly play with a small snippet as you're working through your thoughts. A notebook, on the other hand, elegantly handles all of these considerations. I can use markdown to create a nice article for my future self explaining all of my calculations, have comments, code, and results all next to each other, and tweak parameters on the fly. Yet I still find myself using literate CoffeeScript instead. And the main reason for that is that whenever I use Python, I constantly wish that I was using CoffeeScript instead.