Hello, all — Regarding what I mean by "computational notebooks" and why I took the time to write a robust math plugin:
I think it's really valuable to be able to interactively model information as part of a note-taking and problem-solving process. TiddlyWiki was already very good at doing this for qualitative information, so I made effort to round out those capabilities for quantitative information. My plugin is "spreadsheet-like" because information auto-refreshes like anything else in a TiddlyWiki. I never actually implemented a spreadsheet UI for it. Why would I? — tiddlers and fields already work like rows and columns. I'm a C++ programmer (8 years full-time experience including compiler design, DSP, rendering engines, multithreading), but I don't think imperative languages like C++ or Python are ideal for what I call "computational notetaking". This is because it takes substantial mental effort to design the execution flow, state management and data structures in an imperative language, and this means breaking away from the topic of the notetaking. People who use spreadsheets don't think of themselves as programmers because they don't have to do that kind of juggling, but it's possible to design extremely complicated software in that environment. The key difference is that you can focus on one small element at a time without getting tangled up in the architecture of your program. Less cognitive load there means more sustained attention toward understanding a problem which may already be straining one's cognitive faculties — and as somebody who gets into that situation often with my research, I think that has the potential to expand my capability to think and solve complex problems. As much as I've discussed improving TiddlyWiki's scalability, I don't think computational notetaking tools must be useful for designing applications or scalable software. "Notebook" implies to me that the contents might exist for the sole benefit of the person using it, and that the information is easy to pass around. (For more on the "interactive modeling" I'm talking about, look into explorable explanations <http://explorabl.es/>. I've designed many interactive models for my own use with imperative languages, and have prototyped some explorables <http://evanbalster.com/tiddlywiki/formulas.html#Real%20Projective%20Line:%5B%5BReal%20Projective%20Line%5D%5D%20%5B%5BHarmonic%20Lattice%5D%5D> with my plugin.) On Saturday, 12 May 2018 12:56:52 UTC-5, Mark S. wrote: > > "It pairs the functionality of word processing > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor> software with both the > shell <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_(computing)> and kernel > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(operating_system)> of that > notebook's programming language > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language>." > > That sounds a lot like TW. TW would need a math plugin to easily get to > the "computational" part. Possibly a platform for students or fieldworkers > collecting data. > > -- Mark > > On Saturday, May 12, 2018 at 10:33:53 AM UTC-7, @TiddlyTweeter wrote: >> >> If you wondering what a "Computational Notebook" is and what the current >> enthusiasm about them is about, read ... >> >> 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_interface ... which shows the >> idea is not new, and immediately you can see that TW can be that ... >> >> 2 - https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01676633/document ... a very >> good academic text about them. >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/5295ba08-8a01-4b47-888a-e36e3f13304a%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
