[IPython-dev] Scipy central & IPython notebook.

[Fernando Perez]

On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 1:19 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
> >From my perspective, nbviewer is a poor name for this. The focus
> should be on the content (scientific Python example code), not the
> tools (the notebook). Within that, we can promote the Notebook, but
> naming the site after it would be putting the cart before the horse.

Jumping in a little late here...  Here's my perspective on this:
IPython is an important piece of the pylab ecosystem, and as I argued
vociferously on the scipy-user discussion, I think the notebook should
play an even more prominent role in there.  But it's also very
important to keep this in mind: ipython and the notebook are also used
by, and important to, communities that have nothing to do at all with
scientific work.

And in the spirit of pylab being a federation of collaborating
projects, I think the right solution here is to find a way for say
'pylab-central' (were it to exist) to use something *like* nbviewer,
or nbviewer itself, but without having to tightly couple it to pylab
central, so that it can be equally used by other projects and
communities that don't have scientific uses in mind.

Pylab-central could, for notebooks, simply embed (perhaps in an
iframe) the nbviewer-rendered version of a notebook.  It will be up to
the pylab central developers to decide whether they want to get into
the business of hosting notebooks or they point to people's gists or
full-fledged repos. nbviewer doesn't care where things are: as long as
there's a public URL for an ipynb file, it can render it.

This loose-coupling model seems to me better both in terms of
acknowledging the structure of the pylab/ipython Venn diagram as well
as in the spirit of federated collaboration we're trying to establish
with pylab.

Cheers,

f