Hacker News Reader

Comment by in9 | Hacker News Reader

To be totally honest, even though I love Jupyter notebooks, I wouldn't teach someone to code using it. See, as someone who's not, originally a programmer, I believe that teaching someone to code is intertwined with teaching (gradually) workflows and environments.

Now, Jupyter is great (I'm a statistician btw) precisely because you have a presentable literate programming tool. That is extremely valuable for data analysis and model building.

Now, If you are teaching programming in it self, I think the terminal + text editor is important since that is a step towards how things are done irl. But if you think that the terminal is too much for your audience, just go for IDLE, which has many advantages for python development + teaching, and is already a step towards text editor + terminal or IDE level development.

View on HN

> Now, If you are teaching programming in it self, I think the terminal + text editor is important since that is a step towards how things are done irl.

Jupyter (and similar) Notebooks are a way things are done "in real life"; they aren't just for entertainment purposes; and JupyterLab blends that into an IDE and the IDE with notebooks approach is also a way things have been done "in real life"; both with third-party tools incorporating Jupyter (and earlier IPython) notebooks, and with other IDE's incorporating notebook-style interaction.

Which isn't to say that there aren't arguments for teaching program outside of the notebook environment rather than within it (though the notebook is kind of a super REPL, and REPLs seem to me to be great tools for teaching), but that not using notebooks is better because it is how things are done "in real life" is just taking a highly selective view of real life.

I'm teaching someone to code right now on the Raspberry Pi, and JupyterLab is working far better for us than IDLE or a separate text file and terminal. We use the workflow described in http://jupyterlab.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user/documents_ke.... We open up our python file and a console side-by-side, and pressing shift-enter in the file sends a line or selection to a console. We can easily investigate it in the console outside of the file too.

You can just "pip install jupyterlab" on a Raspberry Pi and it works great!

These criticisms could be valid for Jupyter Notebook, but remember that JupyterLab is what's under discussion in this post. JuptyerLab is much more of an IDE-style than Notebook, and it includes very capable terminal and text editor components.

Although I'm new to Jupyter Lab, I just tried it and it does feel like it could be a very approachable IDE for educational use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com