Real in what way? I'm not too familiar with them, but they seem about on par with the environment for JavaScript that is html files or "web pages".
Making a html document so someone can easily run some JavaScript, seems like the closest parallel to making a jupiter notebook so someone can easily run some python.
Yeah, this simply doesn't work for me; ie the expressions did not evaluate, and output was not made visible.
I have never had a successful experience writing or running programs in notebooks like this--although I have not, arguably, tried with high stakes.
As soon as the stakes rise that far, however, I reach for a whole-ass Unix environment with a shell, a filesystem, and a stateful process model.
Is this a crutch? Is it too much overhead? It's arguably absurd that I even ask. (Edit: It's actually killing me how ambiguous I'm being, right now. There's no winning.)
> As soon as the stakes rise that far, however, I reach for a whole-ass Unix environment with a shell, a filesystem, and a stateful process model.
I don't understand what you mean by "reach for". Don't, for example, Linux desktop users have all these things at hand all the time? For me it would take much more effort to set up a "notebook" than a virtual environment.
For you, sure, but for someone that lives and breathes notebooks, running jupyter notebook and going to localhost:8888 already happened, so it's opening a terminal that's the extra step.
You would start the Jupyter application, then use a browser to go to localhost:8888 :)
To start the application, you would typically use the start menu on Windows or the Dock on MacOS. Alternatively on MacOS you could point the Finder at the /Applications folder, then start the application from the Finder window.
(This is not meant as an endorsement of notebooks.)
Agreed. Even so, you'd be surprised to find that some companies run them in production. I never got the idea behind that, maybe someone that engages in such a practice could enlighten me. I have yet to hear a good rationale.
Programming encompasses things other than production environments and software engineering. Notebooks are fine programming environments for prototyping, exploration and training.
