Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a software engineer and I disagree:

I very often use jupyter to "pop open a shell intro a production service and start interactively debugging stuff live" (over an ssh tunnel, no public open ports and other security considerations, mind you).

It's amazing the feel you get the first time when you open a notebook that acts like a live REPL to smth. like a Django app and you start investigating and trying out stuff by just stitching snippets of code together in a notebook that imports your app and uses its db!

Now I code all API services regardless of tech they use so I can easily "pop open a jupyter REPL into a running system importing app code and running it agains its db".

Interactivity and REPL-driven-development-and-debugging is awesome if you have good discipline to contain the chaos and keep your notebooks aggressively short-lived (any useful code will be refactored and copied into its place in the regular codebase, most notebooks get deleted before merging a branch into dev/master).

Yes, absolutely. What you describe is Django's `manage.py shell_plus`, which does not use a notebook.

So not to be argumentative, but to be clear about this discussion, I'm going to say that your comment is 70% irrelevant, since using an interactive REPL is routine in python development.

However, it is 30% relevant, because retrieving and archiving the code you ran is going to be much more convenient in a notebook than by using %history or whatever in a shell-based ipython.

On reflection, I'm not even sure that the notebook is that much of an advantage over shell-based ipython for archiving the commands. One problem is with a notebook, you have less idea what you've actually executed: you just have a bunch of code sitting in cells in a web app. Whereas the shell UX is extremely simple/linear: if a command is in ipython history, then you executed it.

yeah, but sometimes you want to execute snippet 12 4 times then using a variable derived from that go back to snippet 8 etc.

notebooks are about non-linear execution

sure, there's enough rope to hang the whole neighborhood in that, you can totally f things up with no chance of recovery by doing that, or end up with data you have no idea how you got at and no way to re-trace 100% deterministically your steps

but if you have some discipline, stick to read-only-wrt-db, and you just delete whole notebook when things stop making any sense, it's... magical to have all that power and freedom at you finger tips, without having to keep much stuff in your working memory since you can dump it in a var or cell anytime, and mix your text notes through the code too!

It's not for everyone, but I love this beautiful chaos :)

OK, fair enough!

All of which does seem to paint a picture of a programming environment which is handy for ad-hoc interventions and graphical/audio/video/HTML output but highly unsuitable for organized development of a code base (even a small one), highly unsuitable for systematic debugging, and highly unsuitable for beginners learning to program beyond their first baby steps (as @cycomanic points out elsewhere in this discussion).

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