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Comment by wizzard0 | Hacker News Reader

basically if you have a bunch of code blocks that depend on each others' results - you don't have to remember which ones to update if you changed one, it will update automatically.

especially useful with data visualization/exploration, but also helps a lot if you have a complex sequence where it's easy to get lost and forget to recompute something. there's a youtube link in the comments here which explains a lot.

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> you don't have to remember which ones to update if you changed one, it will update automatically.

Although I see how that would enable rapid iteration and make e.g. creating nice visualizations much easier, I don't think it should be mandatory. The user may want to control the state their notebook and variables are in manually.

> The user may want to control the state their notebook and variables are in manually.

Can you share an example where you’d want that behavior? Spreadsheet cells don’t ask you when they update themselves.

There's an option for that. It's needed if your spreadsheet is too big / your calculations are too expensive.

Thanks; that’s good to know!

Isn't that like saying you want to control your execution manually? Basically, this just get rids of the manual refresh button that would be required to sync pieces of dependent computations after code or data changes somewhere. It is as if the graphics were running in immediate mode being refreshed completely on every frame (a common goal for live programming systems).

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