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I Like Notebooks

Jeremy Howard · talk · Watch on YouTube

Testing, debugging & developer toolsData science & statisticsSoftware practice, open source & careers

What it is

Jeremy Howard defends Jupyter notebooks as a serious development environment, especially when paired with nbdev. He responds directly to Joel Grus's talk about why he dislikes notebooks, and contrasts REPL-style and notebook-style work.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Whenever notebooks get criticized, HN commenters point to it as the standard rebuttal from a prominent practitioner.

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 5 different months
  • 3 strong recommendations
  • first 2020, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “I think both talks are very worth watching”

    Jeremy Howard's defense of notebooks as a development medium

    tosh, 2020-10 · Strong recommendation · in “I Violated a Code of Conduct”

  2. “I strongly recommend Jeremy Howard's (founder of fast.ai) recent talk”

    Addresses common critiques of Jupyter notebooks

    armanboyaci, 2020-12 · Strong recommendation · in “Interactive C++ for Data Science”

  3. “That video cannot be seen without watching Jeremy Howard's rebuttal”

    Howard's rebuttal to criticism of notebooks

    3eb7988a1663, 2024-09 · Strong recommendation · in “Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta”

  4. “I have a video where I show the difference between these styles of working in some detail”

    Shows differences between line-oriented REPL and notebook working styles

    jph00, 2020-11 · Recommendation · in “Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: jupyter, nbdev, literate programming, fastai, developer workflow

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