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My hunch is the same disdain you probably have towards scientists using excel is how many software engineers feel about your using jupyter.

It isn't that you aren't getting good results and doing good work. It is that there are many practices that were hammered out in software development that were completely tossed out the window. 4GL comes to mind as a comparison. Makes great demos. Is not likely to lead to good engineering.



I use Jupyter for two things:

1. Interactive computation and plotting, run data through a pipeline.

2. Quick prototyping and testing. Once a function/class is ready, it goes into a module, together with some unit tests.

Nothing beats Jupyter for that second use case, 90% of the bugs are squashed through interaction and inspection in the notebook cells, not through unit tests.


That some folks can be productive with a tool doesn't say, necessarily, much about the tool. Some could probably make the same two claims for excel. It isn't that the tool should be banned, per se. Just that many practices that have been rather proven in software are much harder to do in this environment.

Sounds like what you like is the live coding aspect. Many of the lisp environments of yesteryear would have probably appealed to you. So would many earlier math packages such as matlab and mathematica. Both of those have had environments similar to the new "notebooks" for many years.

For the pure coding side, imagine using an environment that actually allowed live redefinition of stuff in the code you had written. Step debugging. Breakpoints. Conditional breakpoints.


> Some could probably make the same two claims for excel

As a tool Excel has provided astronomical real world value.

There are only a small handful of other tools that even come close.


I'm pretty sure this puts us in agreement. Right? :)

I think the counter is there is probably a lot of damage excel has done, as well. I'm not convinced other tools would have resulted in no bugs/problems.




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