I Don't Like Notebooks [slides] | Hacker News Reader

I Don't Like Notebooks [slides]

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18 pointstaeric8 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856700

Thanks for linking! I naively assumed that I would get redirected to any previous submissions when I put in the link.

I really dislike meme-heavy presentations because they add a cultural layer to the presentation that:

1. Expects the audience to be familiar with what's being implied by the meme

2. Influences people who ARE familiar with the meme depending on their individual tastes regarding that meme or memes in general

3. Are visually inconsistent and incredibly busy, making it tiring to parse each slide

I really do want to see his thoughts on Notebooks and recognize that his slides are meant as an accompaniment to his verbal presentation, but there are just so many barriers to digesting his argument here and so many ways I feel like he could have actually used the slides to provide supplementary information rather than entertainment.

I’ll add that on a slow connection like mine at the moment, after 30s I gave up because I still hadn’t received the first one.

I am glad I'm not the only one. I find the hidden state confusing, and I prefer my code to be in plain text files in a git repo.

They are great for teaching everything except coding, use them for that, the hidden state discussion is interesting and does come up frequently in practice, I think I learnt something from this presentation. they shouldn't be really used for development except as a scratch pad and they shouldn't be used for teaching programming. However, they should definitely be used in teaching in courses that are currently using suboptimal solutions and are traditionally not programming courses, although might have some limited computational content. That is what I use them for.

"Notebooks have tons and tons of hidden state that's easy to screw up an reason about."

I think this is the main point and something I can relate to. It's not only a problem I see in software like Jupyter but primarily in Excel. Yet people seem to love this approach.

I honestly haven't tried Jupyter (is that the only "notebook"?), but I'm glad that I'm not missing out.

I really don't get the problem that it's trying to solve. Wikis work great, git repos work great and issue trackers work great; I really don't see much of a need for anything more.

Does someone have a positive pitch for this concept? I'd really like to see an opinionated alternative perspective.

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