Re: [Orgmode] [org-babel] Does org-babel needs some simplification?
Hi Torsten, I love the idea of a Babel for dummies manual, and I'm an even bigger fan of the manual being produced by user's of Babel (i.e. not myself). I'll be more than happy to support this effort in any way. Also, the beta-testing role you mention could be extremely helpful. In the absence of a comprehensive test suite it can be hard for Dan and I to exhaustively check new features against all of the possible languages and header argument combinations. A filter of language-savvy users exercising new Org-babel changes could very likely save the Every day babel user (is there such a thing?) from many headaches. Maybe something like a sandbox-babel branch of the git repository would be appropriate as a testing ground for new Babel commits. That said the rate at which Babel is currently being developed is not sustainable (at least not if I'm doing all of the development), and the number of daily changes should drop dramatically in the next couple of weeks. So such a group may find itself without much work to do in the not to distant future -- not that that would necessarily be a bad thing. Thanks! -- Eric Torsten Wagner torsten.wag...@gmail.com writes: Hi, many thanks for the nice thoughts and posts. To sum up, I think it might not be easy to remove parts of org-babel since it is difficult to determine and a highly personal decision to define what is important and what is unimportant. Nevertheless Carten and Eric pointed out that the overhelming feature set of org-babel, the fact that you could achive the same thing in different ways and the missing of a org-babel for dummies might be a problem for new org-babel users as well as for infrequent users. Recently org-mode got his org-mode for dummies short manual. I guess in the case of org-babel it might make more sense to create rather typical examples for particular languages. This manuals could consist of a typical example and of a template for this example which makes it easy for beginners to fill in there own code and text. Since Eric and the other org-babel and org-mode contributors are already fully occupied with keeping org-babel and org-mode running, I would suggest to collect a group of org-babel manual supporters. If possible for each supported language one. This group could write up standard situations for the particular language and maintain those manuscripts whenever org-babel introduces some changes. In fact this group could also serve as a kind of beta-testers for org-babel by trying on request from e.g., Eric to compile there examples with the new org-babel versions. I know there are some standard tests but I guess the do not go that fare. I guess, the manual maintainers do NOT have to be experts in both org-mode resp. org-babel nore they have to be experts in the supported language. Its more about the kind of standard stuff and maybe, to complex stuff even scare people. More things like How to create a measurement protocol with org-babel and python, How to evaluate and report data analysis with org-babel and R, etc. To make it more easy for both the readers and the maintainers a kind of template for such manuals might be helpful. This would help to find the same information at the same locations and make a comparison e.g. between the use of R and python possible. I'am not an expert for both org-* and python and I'm often very limited in time. However, I would try to maintain a python and org-babel manual. If there are more people who are interested to act as a kind of manual maintainers I would like to discuss with you how a template might look like. Best regards Torsten On 06/29/2010 12:51 PM, Torsten Wagner wrote: Dear All, as a (quite, but happy) org-bable user of the first hour I followed up the development process actively. Nevertheless, some weeks or months pass where I had no need for org-babel (yes, really strange I know). Whenever I come back to org-babel, it takes me a huge amount of time to find myself back again in the syntax. Often I spend a day or two heavily reading the website and manual again to figure out how to make it working. There are so many options. tangle files, results, scripting mode, sessions, noweb, lot, etc. Just yesterday, I fighted again to make a simple python script running as desired to generate an automatic report. I did this dozen of times and even by using some old report as template I still struggle with it. Comparing old reports I noticed that I did it in many different ways. Tangeling all snipplets, using noweb syntax, with and without session support, etc. Don't get me wrong, I really love org-babel and I think it is really great. I just wonder wether it has become too complex and too difficult to use to attract most of the org-mode people. Esp. considering people who use it not on a regular basis. Best regards Torsten ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list
Re: [Orgmode] [org-babel] Does org-babel needs some simplification?
Hi, many thanks for the nice thoughts and posts. To sum up, I think it might not be easy to remove parts of org-babel since it is difficult to determine and a highly personal decision to define what is important and what is unimportant. Nevertheless Carten and Eric pointed out that the overhelming feature set of org-babel, the fact that you could achive the same thing in different ways and the missing of a org-babel for dummies might be a problem for new org-babel users as well as for infrequent users. Recently org-mode got his org-mode for dummies short manual. I guess in the case of org-babel it might make more sense to create rather typical examples for particular languages. This manuals could consist of a typical example and of a template for this example which makes it easy for beginners to fill in there own code and text. Since Eric and the other org-babel and org-mode contributors are already fully occupied with keeping org-babel and org-mode running, I would suggest to collect a group of org-babel manual supporters. If possible for each supported language one. This group could write up standard situations for the particular language and maintain those manuscripts whenever org-babel introduces some changes. In fact this group could also serve as a kind of beta-testers for org-babel by trying on request from e.g., Eric to compile there examples with the new org-babel versions. I know there are some standard tests but I guess the do not go that fare. I guess, the manual maintainers do NOT have to be experts in both org-mode resp. org-babel nore they have to be experts in the supported language. Its more about the kind of standard stuff and maybe, to complex stuff even scare people. More things like How to create a measurement protocol with org-babel and python, How to evaluate and report data analysis with org-babel and R, etc. To make it more easy for both the readers and the maintainers a kind of template for such manuals might be helpful. This would help to find the same information at the same locations and make a comparison e.g. between the use of R and python possible. I'am not an expert for both org-* and python and I'm often very limited in time. However, I would try to maintain a python and org-babel manual. If there are more people who are interested to act as a kind of manual maintainers I would like to discuss with you how a template might look like. Best regards Torsten On 06/29/2010 12:51 PM, Torsten Wagner wrote: Dear All, as a (quite, but happy) org-bable user of the first hour I followed up the development process actively. Nevertheless, some weeks or months pass where I had no need for org-babel (yes, really strange I know). Whenever I come back to org-babel, it takes me a huge amount of time to find myself back again in the syntax. Often I spend a day or two heavily reading the website and manual again to figure out how to make it working. There are so many options. tangle files, results, scripting mode, sessions, noweb, lot, etc. Just yesterday, I fighted again to make a simple python script running as desired to generate an automatic report. I did this dozen of times and even by using some old report as template I still struggle with it. Comparing old reports I noticed that I did it in many different ways. Tangeling all snipplets, using noweb syntax, with and without session support, etc. Don't get me wrong, I really love org-babel and I think it is really great. I just wonder wether it has become too complex and too difficult to use to attract most of the org-mode people. Esp. considering people who use it not on a regular basis. Best regards Torsten ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Please use `Reply All' to send replies to the list. Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
Re: [Orgmode] [org-babel] Does org-babel needs some simplification?
On Jun 28, 2010, at 5:51 PM, Torsten Wagner wrote: Dear All, as a (quite, but happy) org-bable user of the first hour I followed up the development process actively. Nevertheless, some weeks or months pass where I had no need for org-babel (yes, really strange I know). Whenever I come back to org-babel, it takes me a huge amount of time to find myself back again in the syntax. Often I spend a day or two heavily reading the website and manual again to figure out how to make it working. There are so many options. tangle files, results, scripting mode, sessions, noweb, lot, etc. Just yesterday, I fighted again to make a simple python script running as desired to generate an automatic report. I did this dozen of times and even by using some old report as template I still struggle with it. Comparing old reports I noticed that I did it in many different ways. Tangeling all snipplets, using noweb syntax, with and without session support, etc. Don't get me wrong, I really love org-babel and I think it is really great. I just wonder wether it has become too complex and too difficult to use to attract most of the org-mode people. Esp. considering people who use it not on a regular basis. Best regards Torsten Hi Torsten, Part of the difficulty might be that certain default behaviors changed in the last several months. What worked in, say, February might not work the same way today. I've been thrown for a loop more than once when old files didn't work as they once did. So, this could cause problems for someone away from babel for a few months. What would you simplify? Could the library of babel help with this? All the best, Tom ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Please use `Reply All' to send replies to the list. Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
Re: [Orgmode] [org-babel] Does org-babel needs some simplification?
Hi Torsten, Thanks for bringing this up. I think you're right that Org-babel does need to expose some simple points of entry. However in reviewing the points of complexity, - tangling - noweb references - the profusion of header arguments - the library of babel my immersed and subjective perspective is that all of these moving parts do a pretty good job of being orthogonal, i.e. they don't overlap or duplicate functionality and each additional piece adds new functionality which would be otherwise impossible. So assuming that all of these facets of Org-babel are essential (please let me know if anyone thinks that there are chunks which could be re-factored out), then the issue becomes making it straightforward to do most *common* tasks w/o having to dive into much of the complexity. This probably means good default values for all configurable parameters, and better documentation. We have some example usage documents up on worg [1], however those focus on showing off all of the bells and whistles. I like the idea of compiling some simple language-specific demos which walk through the basic usage of Org-babel with pointers-to, but no inclusions-of the more complex features. Hopefully this is something we can improve in the near future. Thanks -- Eric Torsten Wagner torsten.wag...@gmail.com writes: Dear All, as a (quite, but happy) org-bable user of the first hour I followed up the development process actively. Nevertheless, some weeks or months pass where I had no need for org-babel (yes, really strange I know). Whenever I come back to org-babel, it takes me a huge amount of time to find myself back again in the syntax. Often I spend a day or two heavily reading the website and manual again to figure out how to make it working. There are so many options. tangle files, results, scripting mode, sessions, noweb, lot, etc. Just yesterday, I fighted again to make a simple python script running as desired to generate an automatic report. I did this dozen of times and even by using some old report as template I still struggle with it. Comparing old reports I noticed that I did it in many different ways. Tangeling all snipplets, using noweb syntax, with and without session support, etc. Don't get me wrong, I really love org-babel and I think it is really great. I just wonder wether it has become too complex and too difficult to use to attract most of the org-mode people. Esp. considering people who use it not on a regular basis. Best regards Torsten ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Please use `Reply All' to send replies to the list. Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode Footnotes: [1] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/uses.php ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Please use `Reply All' to send replies to the list. Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
Re: [Orgmode] [org-babel] Does org-babel needs some simplification?
Hi Erik, Erik Iverson er...@ccbr.umn.edu writes: [...] I have not used it for Python, but for R coding I've found it incredibly intuitive. However, that might be because R has long supported literate programming through Sweave, complete with noweb syntax and code tangling. Speaking of the Sweave/Babel relation, I've recently re-worked an existing Sweave tutorial into babel. See the last section of http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/uses.php#foo I personally don't think it's too complex. One thing that could help is a gentle introduction written by users of each language that babel supports. Yes, I couldn't agree more that this would be very helpful. I have started something like that with R already on my blog, see http://blogisticreflections.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/introduction-to-using-r-with-org-babel-part-1/ That's great! I would love to link to your article perhaps as part of a revamped series of language-specific Org-babel documentation and demonstrations on Worg. Cheers -- Eric ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Please use `Reply All' to send replies to the list. Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
Re: [Orgmode] [org-babel] Does org-babel needs some simplification?
Hello! snip Whenever I come back to org-babel, it takes me a huge amount of time to find myself back again in the syntax. Often I spend a day or two heavily reading the website and manual again to figure out how to make it working. There are so many options. tangle files, results, scripting mode, sessions, noweb, lot, etc. Just yesterday, I fighted again to make a simple python script running as desired to generate an automatic report. I did this dozen of times and even by using some old report as template I still struggle with it. Comparing old reports I noticed that I did it in many different ways. Tangeling all snipplets, using noweb syntax, with and without session support, etc. snip I have not used it for Python, but for R coding I've found it incredibly intuitive. However, that might be because R has long supported literate programming through Sweave, complete with noweb syntax and code tangling. I personally don't think it's too complex. One thing that could help is a gentle introduction written by users of each language that babel supports. I have started something like that with R already on my blog, see http://blogisticreflections.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/introduction-to-using-r-with-org-babel-part-1/ I think the best thing to do is to figure out a system that works for you, and document it (in org-mode of course!) so that there are notes the next time you come back to the file, or need to produce a new file. Of course, the authors of babel might have plans to somehow simplify syntax, but I just wanted to point out that, like anything, with some repetition, you can commit the main ideas to memory and then consult the manual when needed. I found that spending a couple hours running all the possible options in the manual with R while taking notes went a long way in helping me understand how it it all works. Best Regards, Erik ___ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Please use `Reply All' to send replies to the list. Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
