> One more thought on this... I assume you've seen Jupyter Notebooks? > They're starting to see some use where I work (we now have our own > 'enterprise server'). I recently took an intro class to see how it works, > and how to use them. > > How much of a "Jupyter-style" notebook capability would the community be > interested in? By that I mean having the ability to mix 'rich' > documentation with code and data to produce interactive 'notebooks' with > similarities to what Jupyter does -- but simpler! Jupyter is much too > complicated…
I would not go that road for class and package comments. Now we have a good infrastructure for doing this with Pillar. > What you describe for enhanced comments sounds like a step in that > direction... Obviously Pharo is already oriented toward mixing code and > data in one document, and enhancing the comments moves it closer to a > notebook with richer documentation possibilities. > > So it seems to me that generalizing this "enhanced document capability" and > making it more prominent (such as giving it its own type of window, rather > than it being a browser pane tied to the code?) would take it closer yet to > realizing a general, flexible "Pharo Notebooks" concept. In the future (once I have finished making sure that we can write book in microdown) we could think about loading book in notebooks with a bit more liveness. Now it requires man power and we are busy on other topics. GT is already doing it. > My understanding is that Offray's Grafoscopio is essentially what I'm > describing, but maybe more oriented to data analysis & presentation..?? (He > can say better than I, as I'm not sure how accurate that is.) I am thinking > of something that would include that, but maybe be more general-purpose. > > Part of this idea is to feature a "semi-automated" subset of Spec2 that > makes it easier to get nice graphical UIs in a notebook fashion -- but does > not require as much depth of understanding Spec2. (All of Spec2 allows > anyone to build anything.. but not everyone needs to build so much..? This > is the value of frameworks and selectable motifs, yes?) > > Could what I'm describing be a way for everyone to step easily into Spec2 > when its full flexibility for making GUIs isn't needed (yet)? By this I'm > implying code generators that create common/typical Spec2 framework classes > & methods that would make up the front-end of the 'documentation' element of > "Pharo Notebooks". Pharo being Pharo, one could then customize further… To me documenting framework is another level. For now I would be more than happy if we would have a good old way book containing tutorials about Spec2. > Because "it's always easier to edit something than to create from a blank > page", yes? > > I can see Pharo taking away "market share" from Jupyter Notebooks, by being > simpler and easier to work with. Data + Code + Document: All three elements > being "live" and interactive. Pharo has the first two.. What about the > third? Having a document renderer is a first step then after we can decide what is the semantics of certain boxes inside the texte and get some live and others not. But this requires coding effort. S.
