On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 9:52 PM C. Titus Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> > "What I need to run it" has been much, much more problematic over the 23 > years > I've been doing this stuff (pardon my gout ;). My code can unfortunately > depend on all sorts of UNIX gobbledygook, down to specific (and recent) > versions of gcc. Only with the advent of full virtualization (and now the > cloud > and Docker) have I found what I think is an acceptable solution. The > specific > execution environment isn't all that important, be it cloud, Docker or a > VM; > it's the idea of being able to *computationally* specify the environment > that > is important. And that is where Docker, in particular, excels. > > Reproducing the environment in which something was run is at least 50% of the difficulty of replicating something. I think an important point in the whole Docker story is that the Dockerfile is far more valuable than the image it produces. The Dockerfile is almost a standard for specifying how to obtain the environment. A human can read and re-produce it if we lost all the docker tools as well as LXC support in the kernel. It would be painful but it could be done. This is why I believe people have to publish the Dockerfile, not just the image that is produced by it. > On the flip side, I've found that I don't really need Docker, or VMs, in > my own work - it's just when I'm conveying it to others that it's useful. > You need to work more on shared systems where sys admins can replace/upgrade things while you are on holiday ;) I think the JSON format of the notebook is problematic (although > it's understandable why they went that way). The RMarkdown format is kinda > nice and simple, and easily parseable. > > nbconvert can create markdown with code blocks from a notebook, and there are tools that will run it (or convert it back to a notebook). I think these tools will gain more popularity for executable papers in the future. They solve the "in what order should I run this" problem, are diff-able, and you can read them in a text editor and follow along if we lose all the jupyter tooling. T
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