Jupyter Notebooks considered harmful? @jsinger_compsci making the case at @EPCCed today.pic.twitter.com/mXsEuQzkx0
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I think this is wildly unfair... jup met and meets many of my needs for interactive data analysis that were unmet in the 90s, when I was also doing research ;). Most alternatives were closed, none were web based, etc etc. I’m sure there are better things possible, of course.
And when you combine with the ecosystem level stuff, including JupyterHub and Binder, I don’t see alternatives... the expansion to JupyterLab (and other alternative frontends) shows that this is a platform approach that works.
Sorry, I don't know if we will agree on this, but I actually think I agree with you as well as with the harsh stuff I said.
And I use jupyter pretty much all the time.
It's definitely a tool that has its uses. I think it is often misused though. I'm quite keen when I get a chance to play with the Jupyter Notebook <-> Visual Studio Code stuff. You know, in my infinite time!
I think my logic from my Matlab post is exactly what the issue is here: "GUIs and IDEs are great — just like once we already know how to drive using a manual transmission we can easily switch to automatic — but they predominantly do not push us to develop our skills further."
"If we want to we can switch to a fancy IDE after we already know the tougher stuff. We learn multiplication tables off by heart before we switch to using our smartphone as a calculator." Tools are tools. Not universal solutions.
"Research will throw harder programming tasks at us than quickly making graphs or fast matrix multiplication. Thus we need to accept that sometimes learning new things can be hard (as well as fun)."
I'd say this tweet detracts from the rest of your points, since it feels like an ad-hominem against both the project itself & anyone who considers it genuinely useful.
Saying something about the generic notebook concept doesn't imply these shortcomings can't be addressed. I believe the concept as served up is very hype-driven.
In the real world see my tweets on why hype/oversimplified thinking can't get you that far. Please read this sub-thread:https://twitter.com/o_guest/status/1070713373292199937 …
And to be clear, I consider jupyter genuinely useful.
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