Notebooks and Exploration

The Atlantic has a nice article on genesis and evolution of Mathematica and Jupyter notebooks, and how the latter was inspired by the former. It is provocatively (unfortunately) titled, "The Scientific Paper is Obsolete".

The article itself is more thoughtful and nuanced.

It is a reflection on the use of notebooks as exploratory vehicles, and as computational essays. This is indeed how I use Jupyter notebooks these days. I use them as a pre-processing tool (exploratory mode) when I have to design a new lecture or lab, or plan a set of new calculations. I also use them as a post-processing tool, especially in my research. Once all the raw computation is done, I can play with the results interactively, and eventually interleave a narrative and charts. This notebook often becomes the starting point of the "Results and Discussion" section of any resulting paper.

Here are some passages from the article that I found interesting or appealing:

The notebook interface was the brainchild of Theodore Gray, who was inspired while working with an old Apple code editor. Where most programming environments either had you run code one line at a time, or all at once as a big blob, the Apple editor let you highlight any part of your code and run just that part. Gray brought the same basic concept to Mathematica, with help refining the design from none other than Steve Jobs.

“I’ve noticed an interesting trend,” Wolfram wrote in a blog post. “Pick any field X, from archeology to zoology. There either is now a ‘computational X’ or there soon will be. And it’s widely viewed as the future of the field.” 

A 1997 essay by Eric S. Raymond titled “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” in some sense the founding document of the modern open-source movement, challenged the notion that complex software had to be built like a cathedral, “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation.” Raymond’s experience as one of the stewards of the Linux kernel (a piece of open-source software that powers all of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, and the vast majority of mobile devices) taught him that the “great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches” that defined open-source projects was actually a strength. “The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock,” he wrote.

The Mathematica notebook is the more coherently designed, more polished product—in large part because every decision that went into building it emanated from the mind of a single, opinionated genius. “I see these Jupyter guys,” Wolfram said to me, “they are about on a par with what we had in the early 1990s.” They’ve taken shortcuts, he said. “We actually want to try and do it right.”