Paul,

To clarify, the notebooks that you mention in your link have two key
features. First, they provide online sharing, so it is very easy to show
your colleagues some ideas and calculations. Your colleagues can probably
even try manipulating the data in their browser, if it's fancy enough.
Second, they provide means for (1) writing code, (2) writing prose, (3)
typesetting math, and (4) embedding media such as pictures. They are, in
essence, Mathematica clones for their respective languages.

PDL does not have an equivalent to this sort of tool. I wrote a rudimentary
offline GUI data analysis program called App::Prima::REPL, but that was
more targeted at the Matlab audience, not the Mathematica audience. It was
also a giant pile of spaghetti, and I got stalled partway through a
refactoring effort. It is not document focused, but rather tab focused.
There is an API for building our own custom tabs, but it's really more of a
programmer's tool, not a scientists log book.

I have lately found myself doing a lot of thinking in LyX, then programming
in Perl. I would really like if there was some way for me to combine all of
that into a single document, much like the notebooks that you mention.
However, my programming time has lately been dedicated to other projects
(especially, this last week, polishing off some final work on
PDL::Graphics::Prima for a forthcoming release).

If you are interested in helping, please let me know. I'd love to work with
somebody on this. :-)

David


On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Craig DeForest <[email protected]>
wrote:

> I wouldn't say there's an online notebook viewer so much a powerful
> toolkit to build one.  David Mertens recently implemented
> PDL::Graphics::Prima, which is an object framework that can be used to
> construct interactive notebooks very simply and quickly.  For example, you
> can generate a plot object and connect it to a PDL, and very easily update
> the plot as the PDL evolves - or autogenerate/autoupdate plots as you carry
> out a calculation.
>
> That is sort of in keeping with the PDL "style" -- our niche seems to be
> powerful tools that are expert-friendly, rather than polished packages.
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 13, 2014, at 9:27 AM, Paul Goodall <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > Apologies if this has a very obvious answer, but does PDL have an
> equivalent to the online notebook viewers available to the likes of Python,
> Ruby and (even) Julia?
> > http://nbviewer.ipython.org
> >
> > I’d really like to make use of this ‘IPDL’ if it exists.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Paul
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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-- 
 "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
  Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
  by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan
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