Hi David, Craig, 

I’d be happy to help with this - I should have spare time in between projects 
to contribute to it.

Personally, I don’t think it would be a bad thing for PDL to be more accessible 
to the general community.  Typically when I explain to others that I use PDL, 
I’m met with a blank face, prompting for an explanation.  It would be nice if 
PDL were to be recognised as a desirable skill in the same way that Python is 
(particularly, for example, in job interview situations).  It is a shame that 
more people don’t know about/have the power of PDL at their fingertips :-)

Paul


On 13 Jun 2014, at 18:12, David Mertens <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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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