Comment by gnulinux

Comment by gnulinux 10 months ago

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It's a literate programming tool. If you find literate programming useful (such as Donald Knuth's Latex) then you can write a Jupyter notebook, add text, add latex, titles, paragraphs, explanations, stories and attach code too. Then, you can just run it. I know that this sounds pretty rare but this is mostly how I write code (not in Jupyter notebook, I use Markdown instead and write code in a combination of Obsidian and Emacs). To me, code is just writing, there is no difference between prose, poetry, musical notation, or computer programming. They're just different languages that mean something to human beings and I think they're done best when they're treated like writing.

crabbone 10 months ago

I have to disagree... Literate programming is still programming: it produces programs (but with an extra effort of writing documentation up-front).

Jupyter is a tool to do some exploratory interactive programming. Most notebooks I've seen in my life (probably thousands at this point) are worthless as complete programs. They are more akin to shell sessions, which, for the most part, I wouldn't care storing for later.

Of course, Jupyter notebooks aren't the same as shell sessions, and there's value in being able to re-run a notebook, but they are so bad at being programs, that there's a probably a number N in low two-digits, where if you expect to have to run a notebook more than N times, you are better off writing an actual program instead.

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  • gnulinux 10 months ago

    Literate programming is not just "documentation + code" any more than a textbook you read about Calculus is "documentation + CalculusCode" or a novel is "documentation + plot". It goes way beyond that, using literate programming you can attach an arbitrary text that accompanies the code such that fragments of your code is simply one part of the whole text. Literate programming is not just commenting (or supercommenting), if it were, you could use comments, it's a practice of simply attaching fragments of code in a separate text such that you can then later utilize that separate text the same way you utilize code. When you write a literate program, your end goal is the text and the program, not just the program. You can write a literate program, and publish it as is as a textbook, poem, blog post, documentation, website, fiction, musical notation etc... Unless you think that all human writing is documentation then literate programming is not just documentation.

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    • crabbone 10 months ago

      Yes. I tried it. And, eh... it's documentation + code (you can publish code + documentation as a textbook, poem, blog post, Website just as well). No need to exaggerate. It's also very inconvenient to write, for zero benefits. It's kind of like writing prose in one language, and then translating individual pieces of it into another language, while hoping that somehow the sum will still come out OK.

      Some people like challenge in their lives... and I don't blame them. For sport, I would also rewrite some silly programs in languages I never intend to use, or do some code-golfing etc. Literate programming belongs in this general area of making extra effort to accomplish something that would've been trivial to do in a much simpler way.

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      • dayjaby 10 months ago

        > it's kind of like writing prose in one language, and then translating individual pieces of it into another language

        That's why I'm stuck in Tolstoi's War and Peace. You have to know French to get past the first few pages.

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        • crabbone 10 months ago

          Ha! I had to read that in the 8th grade. At first it was very confusing, because I thought I for some reason got a book in French. But then I just skipped to the part where it started in Russian. Later, after a discussion in class, I got a vague idea that that part was some sort of a description of a ball and some high-society stuff... it wasn't at all useful for any further work we had to do on the book, so, I don't actually know what that part was about. All further reading and discussion focused on countess Olga and her thinking about the war (which the teacher claimed was the reflection of Tolstoy's own views).

          But, more to the point of literal programming: it's not the only tool that wants programmers to write some sort of a plan or a sketch of the code before writing code. A much more popular technique is TDD, which, again, wants programmers to write something informally first, and then formalize it later in code. And, as with literal programming, my experience was that it's not helpful to the point of being a distraction.

          There's a good reason to think that some sort of a sketch or a blueprint might be useful for the future program. It works like that in many other disciplines. Artists would make sketches before painting the picture, engineers make blueprints etc.

          I think that the reason why literal programming doesn't work is because unlike a sketch or a blueprint, one has to carry it on forever (and propagate back the changes, once they are discovered) as long as the code is being worked on. It probably would've worked better if it was some sort of a plan that can be abandoned at any point, something to give the development the initial push, but not requiring any further maintenance.

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  • abdullahkhalids 10 months ago

    > Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. Ernest Hemingway

    This is how all intellectual work proceeds. Most of the stuff you write is crap. After many iterations you produce one that is good enough for others. Should we take away the typewriter from the novel writers too, along with Jupyter notebooks from scientists, because most typed pages are crap?

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    • crabbone 10 months ago

      I think, you completely missed the point... I compared Jupyter notebooks to shell sessions: it doesn't make them bad (they are, however, but for a different reason). I don't think that shell sessions are bad. The point I'm making is that Jupyter notebooks aren't suitable for being independent modules inside a larger program (and so are shell sessions). The alternative is obvious: just write the program.

      Can you possibly make Jupyter notebook act like a module in a program? -- with a lot of effort and determination, yes. Should you be doing this, especially since the alternative is very accessible and produces far superior results? -- Of course no.

      Using your metaphor, I'm not arguing for taking the typewriter away from the not-so-good writers. I'm arguing that maybe they can use a computer with a word processor, so that they don't waste so much paper.

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zelphirkalt 10 months ago

Does it support more of literate programming than the small amount of features, that normal Jupyter notebook supports?

I always wish they would take a hint from Emacs org mode and make notebooks more useful for development.

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  • gnulinux 10 months ago

    No it supports less actually. Obsidian is only a markdown editor, it does allow you to edit code fragments like code (so there is basic code highlighting, auto-tabbing etc) but that's it. I personally find this a lot easier in some cases. I find that sometimes if the code is too complicated that you need anything more than just "seeing" you probably need to break it further down to its atomic elements. For certain kinds of development, I do find myself needing to be in "programming groove" then I use Emacs. But other times, I accompany the code with a story and/or technical description so it feels like the end goal is to write the document, and not the code. Executable code is just a artifact that comes with it. It's definitely a niche application as far e.g. the industry goes.

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