[IPython-dev] using the notebook for teaching?

[Emmanuelle Gouillart]

Hi Thomas and Brian,

thank you very much for your answers. I'm glad to know that no format
change is planned for now, and that developers also consider
forward-compatibility to be important.

It will be hard to have everybody use 0.13 during the training: 0.12 is
the version packaged by the latest Ubuntu LTS (12.04) and by the latest
EPD. I do not expect people to be more bleeding-edge than the latest
Ubuntu LTS. Fortunately, the training will be in Spring, hopefully
there will exist a new version of EPD with Ipython 13.

Thanks again,
Emmanuelle

On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 04:32:14PM -0800, Brian Granger wrote:
> Hi,

> Glad you hear you are thinking about using the notebook in this
> capacity.  We think it is a great tool for teaching.  You ask good
> questions about the stability of the notebook format, but I will reply
> to Thomas as well...

> > 0.13 can indeed open v2 notebooks, although it only saves in v3, so it's not
> > practical to use 0.12 and 0.13 together. But we intend to keep compatibility
> > for much longer now - the v3 format was designed to allow much more
> > extension without breaking the ability of 0.13 to read it. This came up in
> > the discussion around standardising the Scipy stack as well. There we said
> > that if we have to break compatibility again, we will need to have an
> > overlap period where IPython can read the new format, but still saves in the
> > old format by default.

> I don't recall this discussion about the notebook format and am
> unaware that we made any such promise.  Do you have a link to the
> discussion?  I neither oppose nor approve of the decision (I haven't
> thought enough about it) at this point, I am just unaware of it and
> want to learn more.

> > Obviously the notebook is still quite young and rapidly developing, but we
> > see the format break from 0.12 to 0.13 as the exception, not the rule. If
> > you decide to use it, make sure everyone starts with at least 0.13.

> Yes.  Right now, the notebook format is quite stable.  But the reason
> we created notebook format versions in the first place is to enable
> the version to change.  While we want to avoid incrementing the
> version, it will happen.  But I want to emphasize that at this point,
> we have no plans of incrementing the version any time soon.  In fact,
> I am not aware of any feature being discussed that would require such
> changing the format.

> Cheers,

> Brian

> > That's great news about the scientific computing curriculum. Good luck with
> > training more people in Python!

> > Best wishes,
> > Thomas

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