I mean that's fair, but if you have to write an academic paper, your options are more or less use a notebook, or copy and paste your results. Of course, the question is how much code you should write in the notebook, versus having it in a more organized set of functions and libraries. It's very easy to end up with a huge bloated document which contains thousands of lines of spaghetti.
> the question is how much code you should write in the notebook, versus having it in a more organized set of functions and libraries. It's very easy to end up with a huge bloated document which contains thousands of lines of spaghetti.
But this isn't correct:
> your options are more or less use a notebook, or copy and paste your results.
What's wrong with writing scripts that write images to disk? That's how millions of academic papers were written before the advent of notebooks. You could use Makefiles if you like, or you could even use a technology such as Sweave to automatically mix images with LaTeX output.
I mean this as politely as possible but the fact that you think that the options are "use a notebook or copy and paste" I think shows that you've caught a notebook mentality disease! The fundamental point I'm trying to make is that you we don't need to do everything interactively from REPLs. REPLs are great for trying things out, but when it comes to producing the images for your paper, those should be produced by scripts, not by commands entered into a REPL, or notebook. An those scripts should evolve via version control, which is the basis of evolving any good and correct software. And the scripts for producing images for a paper should be good and correct software.
We might be talking at cross purposes. I'm thinking of e.g. a Rmarkdown notebook, which is indeed a script not (necessarily) an interactive notebook like Jupyter. And it can be automatically compiled, via a makefile or something similar, and put into version control.
The point is that it makes sense to mix english prose + code to e.g. produce tables or graphs, even if most of the heavy lifting is done separately in code files.
Ah, OK, yes I was talking at cross-purposes to some extent then, thanks. (Jupyter notebooks are hopeless in version control due to the JSON format, but I'm not familiar with Rmarkdown notebooks -- do you get sane diffs?)
Yep, so what you say makes sense. Isn't it sometimes a bit overly prescriptive to assume all collaborators use Rmarkdown? (Perhaps not! I used to work in biology and statistics and R was very ubiquitous.)
Rmarkdown indeed makes sane diffs, it's just a nice text-based format. You can use python or julia as well (see quarto.org for the latest version of this). Getting collaborators on board... yeah, that varies.
