> we decided to assist fastai in their development of a new, literate programming environment for Python, called nbdev.
but this is followed by:
> nbdev builds on top of Jupyter notebooks to fill these gaps and provides the following features
is it a new environment, or is it an extended Jupyter Notebook? It looks like Jupyter Notebook to me. Why not Jupyter Lab?
> JupyterLab: Jupyter’s Next-Generation Notebook Interface https://jupyter.org
The earlier usage mentioned in Wikipedia is entirely uncited there however, and seems to have only been used in one academic project AFAICT.
Here's one from 1988 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/51607.51614
Are these unrelated? Is Nbdev not only a "new programming environment", but also a new concept that needs a new name?
Kent Beck and Martin Fowler
http://index-of.es/Java/Planning%20Extreme%20Programming.pdf
Its a commonly understood term AFAIK
I agree - it's what made me raise an eyebrow... However, based on their comment above, the lead author of Nbdev believes to have coined the term.
My opinion is that due diligence and attribution are important. If I believed I'd coined a new term, I'd check first. Mistakes are easy to make, but when highlighted, perhaps corrections are more appropriate than negotiating with the person highlighting them:
From the lead author (jph00): ... If someone else can think of a better term that's never been used before, then I'll happily use that instead.
This is my second time on hacker news, and I don't think I will be back. Why not offer to help the project, or show support? Why try to find something to fight about? It's just demoralizing to see the lack of kindness from people.
It’s worth calling them out and discouraging this behavior because it leads to missing entire fields of previous work for both the author and people who build on the work.
And if the arguement is that this is a gateway action that leads to other bad things, that's not an arguement I put any stock in. It's used a lot in many places and many discussions, but just focus calling out the bad. It isn't his responsibility to ensure that some person building off his work at some point in the future does the appropriate level of research appropriate for their project. Assuming that an action is bad because you think someday down the road it might lead someone else to do something and that that something will be a bad thing is just ridiculous.
Whether they choose to update the materials and reference existing work is up to them.
But he is, he just claimed he coined “exploratory programming” FFS. It takes a shocking lack of hubris to announce that you are on the cutting edge of a field where you get to coin terms without doing the trivial amount of searching to verify it first.
- Nbdev started right around the 1.0 release of jupyterlab, and it might not have been on their radar
- Nbdev came out of fast.ai, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were using a ton of jupyter-specific features already which weren't supported by jupyterlab
(I'm the lead author of nbdev).
Neither? It doesn't change the features of jupyter notebooks, and its not an improved/expanded UI like jupyter lab (you could use nbdev with jupyter lab). Its utilities and automation to make package/library development a better experience if jupyter is where you write your code.
From https://github.com/fastai/nbdev:
"nbdev is a library that allows you to develop a python library in Jupyter Notebooks, putting all your code, tests and documentation in one place."