(For more on these themes and on dreams of executable books, see numinous.productions/ttft/#executab)
Conversation
My wishlist for exec. books:
– author did their "real thinking" in the authoring computational environment
– reading environment invites + supports meaningful experimentation/exploration
– book elements transparently and usefully reusable by author and readers in derivative works
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Imagine if creating a derivative work was as easy as importing one notebook from another, or even importing it into normal non-notebook code... ;)
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I didn't realize the latter was supported from RunKit—very cool! Are you aware of any serious "executable books" published using RunKit?
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Depends what “serious” means — the goal is precisely to bring notebook style development to normal programming:
1. Tons of bugs filed using RunKit notebooks (no more “works on my computer”, always reproducible forever since packages frozen in time):
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2. A huge amount of “notebooks” embedded in docs all over the web using RunKit embeds — interactive programming “as a service”. Why ask users to imagine code behavior when they can run it on a real Linux server in the docs:
expressjs.com/en/starter/hel
Docs: runkit.com/docs/embed
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Right! These seem like super valuable use cases, and they're the ones I think about when I think about RunKit. I was wondering whether anyone's used it as an environment for interactive expository text, as described in
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Ah, I thought from original tweet you meant the “switching” to real impls by “serious”. Most expository text ends up using embeds interestingly enough (plenty of dev.to use RunKit for their examples fir example). vs. hosting *on* RunKit.
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This is something I’m pretty interested in: the fact that the former model is “host on service” (and don’t own the post on your machine), or host yourself (and probably lose interactivity since it’s just a “rendering”). (Cont.)
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I think embeds strike a good balance, where if like RunKit ever goes away, the example “degrades” to static code. But otherwise the document is “live.” So you can control everything except for the “running”, including the actual code (in your source control right in the post)
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Replying to
Yes, I see the tension there. Maybe ideally you'd like to be able to "bake" the book as a bunch of static stuff you can host yourself.
(But I see how that breaks a bunch of RunKit's node environment magic)
Replying to
Yeah our focus was on “programmers” so the “export” is just essentially a download akin to a container with identical behavior to the notebook (to run on your machine), but we could definitely add a “render” that just turns it into a thing you can publish and style, etc.
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Yeah I like this a lot actually, and it fits really well with our desire to provide the editing / running functionality and not play endless catch-up with largely orthogonal text editing tools. Thanks so much for this idea, I’m pretty excited about it the more I think about it!
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