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Comment by abhirag

I have used both Jupyter Notebooks and org mode with org-babel extensively and I agree with the OP regrading the fact that the org-babel workflow is vastly superior, OP did point out a few features which org mode workflow has and Jupyter Notebooks don't but I will try and provide a comprehensive list:

1. Plain text format, git and git diffs work

2. You can combine many languages in a single document, and every code block can be part of a separate session, as an analogy to Jupyter Notebooks, you can have multiple kernels backing a single notebook and you can decide what kernel you want the current code block to run in.

3. You can edit a code block in the major mode for that language, i.e. you get all the features of Emacs while editing code: documentation, auto-complete, snippets and anything Emacs can do, and Emacs can do a lot :)

4. You can have internal and external links to any part of the document (or any other org-mode file) within the editor which get exported as links in the HTML file too. Want to refer to a code block you used before, just name it and drop a link. Extremely useful in binding the whole document together.

5. Literate Programming support -- You can decide the order the concepts are introduced in according to the human reader, not according to the execution order the machine demands it to be in:

  #+NAME: named_code_block :eval no
  function_not_defined_yet()

  #NAME: complete_code_block
  def function_not_defined_yet():
      print("nice function innit?")
  
  <<named_code_block>>
  
The <<named_code_block>> gets expanded to whatever you defined it and you control the way you want to structure the document to be the most readable. You can keep working backed by a REPL in the initial stages and then extract(tangle in literate programming speak) to a file, again in the order you want using the <<named_code_block>> (NOWEB syntax). So one org-mode can generate your whole project if you wish so.

6. With the internal and external links and <<named_code_block>> (NOWEB syntax) the org-mode file is closer to being a hypertext file than Jupyter Notebook even though Jupyter Notebook is the one running in a browser.

I have covered only the major features of org-babel, I haven't even covered all the features. I love Jupyter Notebooks too, but org-babel is something else. I am currently working on a toy ray tracer in Clojure in literate programming style and loving every moment :)

parent abhirag 8 years ago

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