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by pplonski86 535 days ago
Congratulations on the launch! It's great to see alternatives to Jupyter. JupyterLab is an excellent, however creating editor for broad audience is challenging. I've found Jupyter difficult to use, especially for beginners. Managing kernels, Python environments, and installing new packages can be quite cumbersome. Are you planning to address these challenges in Zasper?
2 comments
dist-epoch 535 days ago
Have you tried the Jupyter desktop app? It's more self-contained.
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pplonski86 535 days ago
Yes, I tried Jupyter Desktop. It is fantastic, I like that you can double click on notebook file to open app. However, it might be a little to complicated for beginners, you need to setup Python and select kernels. That's too much.
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Panoramix 535 days ago
People can program in python but cannot select a kernel from a list? I find that hard to believe
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jerf 535 days ago
I mean this without rancor or insult, but a lot of data scientists may use Python, but are definitely not Python programmers. They know the subset of Python necessary to process data, and literally not one bit more. They would have no idea how to create an iterator function, their own "with" handler, may not even know how to create a new subclass with a method. They just take data in, chew on it, and spit it out.

Again, not an insult intended to them. They have their job and they do it, and I don't know much about their world either, after all. And of course you can find some data scientists who also deeply know Python. My point is merely that modeling them all generically as "Python programmers" in your head can lead to a model that makes bad predictions, which I found in my brief stint in that world can include you building tools for them that expect more out of them than they have.

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hedgehog 535 days ago
That's not to mention getting dependencies installed. I know a good amount about everything from the silicon up and it can still take some time to get to the point where I have a Python ML environment working. Debugging whichever vendor's barque build process, broken drivers, etc etc, not fun and not something we probably want every notebook user to spend time on.
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prasunanand 535 days ago
Yeah, I will work on these problems and I already have solutions in mind. Just wanted to get the word out about the project first and see if the world actually needs something like Zasper.

I am really happy to see the welcoming response from the dev community.

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