[IPython-dev] using the notebook for teaching?

Matt jiffyclub at gmail.com
Thu Dec 6 08:19:03 EST 2012


Hi Emmanuelle,

There is some progress on EPD: https://twitter.com/enthought/status/268457051007623169.
It's very frustrating for us too that IPython 0.13 is not in EPD Free. We've been experimenting with Anaconda CE.

Best,
Matt

On Dec 6, 2012, at 3:45 AM, Emmanuelle Gouillart <emmanuelle.gouillart at nsup.org> wrote:

> 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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