Notes on Notebooks: Is Jupyter the Bringer of Jollity?

As the interactive computational notebook becomes a more prominent code development medium, we examine advantages and disadvantages of this particular source code format. We specify the structure of a coding notebook layout. We describe complexities in notebook programming; some of these are incidental whereas others may be inherent complexities. We outline how we envisage research and development might proceed to advance the cause of notebook programming

FileWeaver: Gestion Flexible de Fichiers avec Suivi Automatique des Dépendances

International audienceKnowledge management and sharing involves a variety of specialized but isolated software tools, tied together by the files that these tools use and produce. We interviewed 23 scientists and found that they all had difficulties using the file system to keep track of, re-find and maintain consistency among related but distributed information. We introduce FileWeaver, a system that automatically detects dependencies among files without explicit user action, tracks their history, and lets users interact directly with the graphs representing these dependencies and version history. Changes to a file can trigger recipes, either automatically or under user control, to keep the file consistent with its dependants. Users can merge variants of a file, e.g. different output formats, into a polymorphic file, or morph, and automate the management of these variants. By making dependencies among files explicit and visible, FileWeaver facilitates the automation of workflows by scientists and other users who rely on the file system to manage their data