Jupyter Notebooks

Last week I followed the feed from the Spark Summit 2015 event and several tweets talked about using Notebooks. Two tweets especially:

Paco Nathan: Notebooks as fundamental a change as spreadsheets were. Speaks to collab of teams involving non-data scientists #SparkInsight

— IBM Big Data (@IBMbigdata) June 16, 2015

Ever wondered what might disrupt Excel or Tableau for analytics? I'm starting to think the Notebook format is a strong contender

— Edd Dumbill (@edd) June 17, 2015

So I got curios in Jupyter, the lab notebooks used in the edX/DataBricks MOOC I'm following (Introduction to Big Data with Apache Spark). And yes, I do agree with Paco Nathan (@pacoid) and Edd Dumbill (@edd); Notebooks do look like a real game changer:  

• VisiCalc and Lous 1-2-3 in the early 80ies. 
• Mosaic and Netscape in the mid 90ies. 
• I get a similar feeling now, in the mid 2010ies, when I see Jupyter Notebooks.
  (Yes, I know it's old news for all Mathematica users :)

The first 20 mins of this great video with Min Ragan-Kelley (@minrk) one of the core contributor to IPython and now to Jupyter, he gives a nice intro and in the following 30 mins he describes several cool examples of Notebooks, e.g. the CodeNeuro notebooks using Thunder based on Spark.

Excellent podcast interview with two other key contributors to iPython/Jupyter: Brian Granger (@ellisonbg) and Fernando Perez (@fperez_org)


Hmm, I need to think more about the combinations of Notebooks (reproducible research) and Linked Data (processable data) ... ...