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I don't like notebooks.- Joel Grus (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence)

O'Reilly · 120.2K views · 2018-10-10 · 56:13

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Overview

Joel Grus's JupyterCon talk explaining why he dislikes Jupyter notebooks. He covers hidden state, trouble with reproducibility and testing, and how notebooks frustrate teaching. He shows his preferred workflow and what Jupyter could change.

On Hacker News

It is the go-to funny, irreverent critique of notebooks, linked whenever HN debates notebooks versus testable code.

Recommended by 6 HN people across 6 months · HN mentions 2018–2025

Topics

Data science & statisticsPython, Ruby & scripting languagesTesting, debugging & developer tools
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jupyterpythondata sciencereproducibilitysoftware engineering

What people said

kevsim · 2019-04 · Strong recommendation

Jupyter notebooks are really abysmal when it comes to best engineering practices. There's an amazing talk called "I don't like notebooks" by Joel Grus at last years JupyterCon [0]. I highly recommend it. [0] [VIDEO]

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tcpekin · 2018-10 · Strong recommendation

Here they are - they're definitely irreverent, but I find myself strongly agreeing with everything he says. [LINK] [VIDEO]

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lelandbatey · 2024-06 · Recommendation

REPL stands for Read–eval–print loop [LINK] A REPL, by its name, is a very narrow version of the broader paradigm of interactive computer programming environments. But Notebooks are not REPLs, unless you use REPL to mean "interactive programming environment" and not REPL. Notebooks are much broader than a REPL! In a notebook, you can go back and edit and run individual lines of the notebook without re-running the whole notebook from the start and without re-computing everything that depends on what you just edited. Behavior like this makes it super hard to track the actual state, and super easy to lose track of how things are how they are. That's pretty terrible! The parent article links this great talk that goes into more detail than the parent post and is much easier to understand: [VIDEO]

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