Programming in Jupyter Notebooks, via the Heavy Metal Umlaut

Way back when, I used to take delight in following the creative tech output of Jon Udell, then at InfoWorld. One of the things I fondly remember is his Heavy Metal Umlaut screencast:

You can read about how he put it together via the archived link available from Heavy metal umlaut: the making of the movie.

At some point, I seem to remember a tool became available for replaying the history of a Wikipedia page that let you replay its edits in time (perhaps a Jon Udell production?) Or maybe that’s a false memory?

A bit later, the Memento project started providing tools to allow you to revisit the history of the web using archived pages from the Wayback Machine.Memento. You can find the latest incarnation here: Memento Demos.

(Around the time it first appeared, I think Chris Gutteridge built something related? As Time Goes By, It Makes a World of Diff?)

Anyway – the Heavy Metal Umlaut video came to mind this morning as I was pondering different ways of using Jupyter notebooks to write programmes.

Some of my notebooks have things of this form in them, with “finished” functions appearing in the code cells:

Other notebooks trace the history of the development of a function, from base elements, taking an extreme REPL approach to test each line of code, a line at a time, as I try to work out how to do something. Something a bit more like this:

This is a “very learning diary” approach, and one  way of using a notebook that keeps the history of all the steps – and possibly trial and error within a single line of code or across several lines of code  – as you work out what you want to do. The output of each state change is checked to make sure that the state is evolving as you expect it to.

I think this approach can be very powerful when you’re learning because you can check back on previous steps.

Another approach to using the notebooks is to work within a cell and build up a function there. Here’s an animated view of that approach:

This approach loses the history – loses your working – but gets to the same place, largely through the same process.

That said, in the notebook environment used in CoCalc, there is an option to relay a notebook’s history in much the same was as Memento lets you replay the history of a web page.

Yuvi Panda started sketching a similar tool for classic notebooks — https://github.com/yuvipanda/nbtimetravel — but it never get as far as the replay component and has long since been archived.

Another way of recreating history is to walk someone through a completed notebook using a screencast. The https://github.com/willkessler/jupytergraffiti classic notebook extension takes this idea a step further and lets you record actions and commentary over a notebook.

In JupyterLab, the https://github.com/jupyterlab-contrib/jupyterlab-tour extension gives a tour of the UI. If a workspace is predefined to present a particular open notebook, for example, could we use a tour to walk through the notebook, I wonder?

In practice, I tend to use both approaches: keeping a history of some of the working, whilst RPLing in particular cells to get things working.

I also dip out into other cells to try things out / check things, to incorporate in a cell, and then delete the scratchpad / working out cell.

I keep coming back to the idea that Jupyter notebooks are a really powerful environment for learning in, and think  there’s still a lot we can do to explore the different ways we might be able to use them to support teaching as well as learning…:-)

PS via Simon Willison, who also recalled a way of replaying Wikipedia pages, this old Greasemonkey script.

PPS Sort of related, and also linking this post with [A] Note On Web References and Broken URLs, an inkdroid post by Ed Summers on Web Histories that reviews a method by Prof Richard Rogers for Doing Web history with the Internet Archive: screencast documentaries.