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by ced
3625 days ago
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Thank you for the babel reference, it looks interesting. From what I can tell, it's pretty similar. In a notebook I'm directly editing the code and seeing the results immediately, instead of switching back and forth between emacs and a browser window. That looks like a pretty big win for interactive development. Is there any babel feature that you think is missing in Jupyter? |
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A major feature Babel offers, which Jupyter doesn't seem to, is passing data among code blocks in different languages. Any language Babel supports [1] can receive results from any other in the receiving language's native idiom, so there's no need to marshal temporary files or what-have-you in order to exchange data among blocks - Babel takes care of that for you. In a case where multiple transformations are necessary to get from source data to results, this makes it very easy to express each in a language well suited to it, without having to spend a bunch of time and mental energy on menial file shuffling.
The same is true for most other representations of data that Org mode supports. In particular, Org tables, which themselves have many features of spreadsheets, can be sourced in code blocks in the same way as the results of other code blocks, and a code block can generate an Org table as a result. These tables can be imported and exported as CSV, too. My work is professional rather than academic, but I can imagine a lot of cases in which this capability would be useful in the latter context, and Jupyter doesn't seem to offer it. (It's hard to tell, because Jupyter's documentation seems pretty thin overall - not something which can be said of Org mode.)
On the whole, Jupyter looks like a pretty nifty tool, and one which would be accessible to people who don't already use Emacs. I'm not sure how I would feel about recommending Emacs to someone just for Org mode, although I've heard several people say they picked up Emacs for precisely that reason and have stuck with it. But, if you already use Emacs and don't have contextual reasons (such as everyone else around you using Jupyter) to choose one tool over another, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend investigating Org mode first, because it is very nearly a strict superset of Jupyter. (It'll be a few years before you can easily embed a video in an Emacs buffer; right now you'd need to use a pre-release version with some extra compile options.)
[1] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages.html