Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice

Re:Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of... by jonnycomputer on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @05:27PM (#18341428)

It might be the case that serializing to json facilitates support for multiple languages, though I wonder how.

With the reticulate package in R Markdown you can run python chunks, by putting, e.g.

```{python}

for i in range(1:10):

    print("{}:{}".format(i, i*i))

# etc

```

And in emacs org-mode you can:

#+begin_src python

for i in range(1:10):

    print("{}:{}".format(i, i*i))

#+end_src

Language support in org-mode is pretty comprehensive, afaik.

I do not know the details of the implementations behind these, but my own source code is plain and simple unserialized text, and that means a lot to me.

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Re:Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of... by joshuamorton on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @05:59PM (#18341641)

Ah, actually it looks like I'm somewhat mistaken. R Markdown supports other languages as well. I think the real difference is that it doesn't look like R Markdown supports partial evaluation.

By that I mean that that to share the r-markdown doc it appears that you need to rerun the whole thing. It does some tricks to do concurrent visualization, but to actually share the doc you have to rerun all the R/python from scratch.

In jupyter OTOH, if I have a long running ML pipeline as part of my doc, I can render without rerunning the pipeline.

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Re:Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of... by huac on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @06:45PM (#18341890)

You can cache the results of an rmd cell, and you can also share the rendered version of the doc first. You're right that there's a higher emphasis on "run the whole thing," and I think that that's a conscious (and acceptable) design choice vs not being sure that the shared doc will run as provided.

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Re:Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of... by joshuamorton on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @09:44PM (#18342738)

Yeah I don't disagree about that, but when the question is why is this ugly format more popular, the answer "one has a share button and the other can be edited in emacs" sort of gives you the answer.

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