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by anigbrowl 3723 days ago
I know. Open source folks, when you put a 'Home' button in the corner, make it go to the project home page, not the blog home page. If there's one thing I can't stand it's a blog post about an update for something that I don't know what it is, and my patience to click around trying to find out whether it is something I would be interested in or not is very limited.

I'm glad I did in this case because an open-source equivalent of Mathematica is a pretty sweet tool, but the site navigation sucks enough that it's likely limiting your audience a bit.

3 comments

Just a heads up: Jupyter Notebook is not an open source alternative to Mathematica. Originally, Jupyter was iPython notebook, an IDE of sorts for data science and analysis in Python, by writing code and markdown together in a more coherent and integrated way. Then they incorporated a host of other popular open source languages for computational science such as R, Julia, F#, ect., so that we could use the best tools for their task, all in one document.
Great summary of Jupyter Notebook!

I'll add that it's a great way to teach python to students. Notebooks can be shared and students basically retain all their legwork as they learn. It's very helpful for visually seeing code work if you are new.

Well, not actually a IDE, I still use Emacs to create my IPython Notebooks in Jupyter.

Although it has and allow the creation of extensions which provide a lot of usefull features. In this version, the nbextensions are introduced as python packages, so that they're even easier to use/install.

The best thing with Jupyter Notebooks, is that one can write text with markdown, show formulas with LaTex (using MathJax), show code inputs and outputs in REPL-style, all together with possible Bash use, other languages' snippets, and nice cell %magics.

>all in one document.

So it is possible to run both R and Python commands in the same notebook?

Yeah, there are bridges for converting Python data types to R and vice versa (Rpy2).
Feather is a recently released data frame file that both R and Python can interface with. We have Hadley Whickam and Wes McKinney to thank for it!
Feels like it should be called circumference, since multiplication is commutative :P (2pyr)
No, R and Python are separate kernels (think compiler). You can mix Shell and Python or Shell and R though.
Every piece of software, in the release notes, should include a brief blurb about what the software is, and a link to get more information.

And yes, the "home" button should go to the project home, not the blog home (or there should be a separate button for that).

Nice thing with open source, is you "just" open an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/issues/139 , and it's fixed soon after. These are design issues we become blind to after working too long on the project, and we would love to have people helping us with that. It's just hard when user don't tell you !