Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Present and past weave together. New tools or old techniques?

I am a bit slow on the uptake of “new” things from time to time. This past week or so I stumbled across this thing called Jupyter. It is a type of “notebook.” Some call it yet another implementation of the “notebook” paradigm. It allows the analyst to weave descriptions of work with short pieces of computer programs. Hmmm. I like this.

Lest we forget…and old people are want to forget at times and remember at others…I seem to recall…

Literate programming: Donald Knuth invented this a few generations ago. (It seems that anything of value invented in the past 50 years came from Knuth, Dijkstra, or Weinberg.) Literate programming combined descriptions of what a person was thinking in English with descriptions of what the computer should do in computer-understandable language, i.e., source code.

Literate programming didn’t catch on nearly as much as I felt it should have. I think the trouble with literate programming and these analyst notebooks is that the person is thinking, understands their thinking, wants to communicate their thinking, and can communicate their thinking.

That is a lot to ask of folks these days. That is a lot to ask of folks any days.

Still, I consider the concept worth exploring and introducing to colleagues.