I Don't Like Jupyter Notebook

I’ve struggled with Jupyter Notebook for a long time and I have to write it down this time - I don’t like it! And I feel relieved when I found that I’m not alone. And here’re the reasons …

1. “WE DON’T LIKE IT!”

Not only me feels that it’s not a quite good tool in some way:

» Why I don’t like Jupyter Notebooks - Dr Owain Kenway

» Why I Don’t Like Jupyter (FKA IPython Notebook) - KIRILL POMOGAJKO

As for me, the reasons why I don’t like to use this tool as a major tool for data analysis are:

2. And We Have Reasons:

I don’t want to put a lot of word here like those two guys above. Here I just list the key points that Jupyter Notebooks annoyed me.

2.1. Code in Chunk is annoying!!

1. Code can only be run in chunks but not line by line.
2. Order matters when running code, which could often bring problems.

2.2. File format incompatible with version control

It’s json, not python source code. It’s bad for version control.

2.3. In order to read your code/document people have to install Jupyter Notebook

Whenever you want to open and take a look at your code in such a notebook, you have to open a local web server and then open a browser. I’m a person preferring simplicity and I really hate this kind of experience.

3. My Solution:

• Keep using Vim only for coding in most cases.
• For exploring, use the REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop) tool iPython.
• Saving the plots in files as a default option in python codes.

KF