Thrilled to discover nbdev from & . It's an attempt to solve a big problem with computational notebooks like Jupyter: you explore problems with a notebook, but usually need to "switch" to a more powerful tool for "real" impls:
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nbdev tries to solve this problem by giving you
- automatically turning notebooks into publishable Python modules
- bidirectional sync with plaintext .py for IDE usage
- fixes for other "real" project needs: tests, continuous integration, documentation export, conflict resolution
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While nbdev seems focused on helping individual developers avoid the "switch" when implementing their own projects, I think layers like this could help solve a big problem with "executable books": the huge barrier for *readers* to build on embedded code to do anything real.
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The fast.ai docs get at something pretty exciting, then. Like many notebooks, it contains narrative content which explains computational material and lets readers explore. But the executable book is *also* the implementation of a published production-level library
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The narrative in those docs is a bit limited: it's more documentation than prose. "Deep Learning for Coders" is the expository text from the same authors, but it isn't made available in an executable context AFAICT. I think that could be really powerful!
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(For more on these themes and on dreams of executable books, see numinous.productions/ttft/#executab)
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The book is in fact available in executable format, for free! :D
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The book itself is nearly entirely auto-generated from the notebooks using fastdoc
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Fantastic!! I regret the oversight. Looking forward to exploring!! 🙌