David Smith sums up a debate on notebooks versus literate programming:
There’s no video yet available of Joel’s talk, but you can guess the theme of that opening slide, and walking through the slides conveys the message well, I think. Yuhui Xie, author and creator of the rmarkdown package, provides a detailed summary and response to Joel’s talk, where he lists Joel’s main critiques of Notebooks:
Hidden state and out-of-order execution
Notebooks are difficult for beginners
Notebooks encourage bad habits
Notebooks discourage modularity and testing
Jupyter’s autocomplete, linting, and way of looking up the help are awkward
Notebooks encourage bad processes
Notebooks hinder reproducible + extensible science
Notebooks make it hard to copy and paste into Slack/Github issues
Errors will always halt execution
Notebooks make it easy to teach poorly
Notebooks make it hard to teach well
Read the whole thing. I agree with some of these points, but disagree with a few on the list.
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