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by carreau 1623 days ago
First, yes, this is a common question. IPython does not try to deal with that, it's just the executing engine.

Notebooks, do not have to be stored in ipynb form, I would suggest to look at https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext, and notebook UI is inherently not design for multi-file and application developpement. So training humans will always be necessary.

Technically Jupyter Notebook does not even care that notebooks are files, you could save then using say postgres (https://github.com/quantopian/pgcontents) , and even sync content between notebooks.

I'm not too well informed anymore on this particular topic, but there are other folks at https://www.quansight.com/ that might be more aware, you can also ask on discourse.jupyter.org, I'm pretty sure you can find threads on those issues.

I think on the Jupyter side we could do a better job curating and exposing many tools to help with that, but there are just so many hours in the day...

I also recommend I don't like notebook from Joel Grus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U it's a really funny talk, a lot of the points are IMHO invalid as Joel is misinformed on how things can be configured, but still a great watch.

1 comments

I see where you're coming from. From where you sit Jupyter is a language agnostic tool and so in. But the fact that there's dozens of solutions in this space is surely a problem?

I'd have thought there would be some things you could strongly encourage:

1. Come up with some standard format where the code and the data live in separate files.

2. Come up with some standard format where you can take load a regular .py script as a cell based notebook using metadata comments (and save it again).

If these came out of the box it would solve most of the issues.