I've never seen that in VW. But your feedback is interesting; maybe
there is something to look at.
I wonder if looking at some of the GTPlayground stuff with another angle
could be interesting (i.e. page approach) or simply study what could be
done if we could capture a task by embedding morphs inside the text.
I feel like the notebook concept in itself is poor in that you have to
interact with the program objects via the command line (i.e. the
language console; be it R or Python, or Mathlab) and that is certainly
inferior to the ability to select and run anywhere, inspect, explore,
playground stuff.
Le 15/07/2014 17:21, Nicolas Cellier a écrit :
We had this kind of workbook 20 years ago in VW with mathematical
formulae and graphics (plot) embedded.
What we did was to avoid continous scrolling of the whole document, but
rather have the plan of the document on the left pane of the notebook
(just an indented tree like word navigation mode), and the text on the
right pane for only the currently selected chapter (in a way, it's a lot
like the source code browser). This way, no need to compose very large
Text in Smalltalk (I also doubt our editors really scale).
Then we could output a static view in PostScript or LaTeX.
The greatest limitation IMO was not really the UI, but the principle of
the Notebook itself: we soon needed to access the results of previous
chunks of code, and we implemented this with an environment (understand
some global variables).
From software quality POV, working with such global vars is very
disappointing and does not really scale either.
The second limitation of the workbook is that, while it's very good for
small projects (like maybe we can have in school), it's not the right
tool for producing documents with a synthesis of the results, which
remain the main added value of humans, so which was what we were asked for.
However I'm still curious how far we can go with those notebooks,
because the idea is seducing. Maybe it was our own usage which was bad...
Thierry
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Thierry Goubier
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