I Like Notebooks
Why Hacker News recommends it
Whenever notebooks get criticized, HN commenters point to it as the standard rebuttal from a prominent practitioner.
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.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2020 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec tosh · 2020-10 · on “I Violated a Code of Conduct”
If you haven't yet: I think both talks are very worth watching: I don't like notebooks ( [LINK] ) by Joel Grus I like notebooks ( [this video] ) by Jeremy Howard notebooks are a very interesting medium and they have both shortcomings as well as things they are great at and neither were totally obvious to me.
Strong rec armanboyaci · 2020-12 · on “Interactive C++ for Data Science”
I strongly recommend Jeremy Howard's (founder of fast.ai) recent talk - "I Like Notebooks" ( [this video] ). He addresses some of the concerns/critiques about jupyter notebooks.
Strong rec 3eb7988a1663 · 2024-09 · on “Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta”
That video cannot be seen without watching Jeremy Howard's rebuttal: I Like Notebooks. I also believe this was the video that got him kicked out of a conference(?) because it was too confrontational? Which was just ugly for a guy who clearly loves being an educator. [0] [this video]
Recommends jph00 · 2020-11 · on “Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices”
No that's not the reason - or at least, not for everyone. I created nbdev. I've been coding for over 30 years, and spent over 10 years using R and S-PLUS. I've used Delphi, Visual Studio, Emacs, vim, vscode, and many other editors and IDEs, including many with integrated line-oriented REPLs. There's a big difference between a line-oriented plain text REPL, and a Mathematica/Jupyter-style notebook REPL, especially when you want to mix and match your charts, image outputs, rich table outputs, interactive JS outputs, and so forth. Also, for experimentation, where you want to go back and change things to see what happens (e.g. very common in data science) I find it much easier and more understan
Recommends jph00 · 2022-07 · on “Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks”
A from-scratch rewrite of nbdev was released today -- details on what's new are in the launch post: [LINK] Let me know if you have any questions or comments -- I'm the lead dev on the project. (If you're in the "I don't like notebooks" camp, please watch this first: [this video] )
Cites tosh · 2020-10 · on “I Violated a Code of Conduct”
afaiu the talk was removed from or not put on the website of the conference, Jeremy recorded a new version: [this video]
Cites sokoloff · 2020-10 · on “I Violated a Code of Conduct”
[this video] is the specific section that seems to have been judged as "unkind". To me, that seems like a massive over-reaction or massively uncharitable interpretation of the talk focused on a single point of disagreement, which was done quite respectfully from what I watched.
Cites zupatol · 2025-12 · on “What is “literate programming”? (2024)”
Another successful example of literate programming is fastHTML, and probably most of the code written at fast.ai and answer.ai. [LINK] Here's Jeremy Howard explaining why he loves doing everything in notebooks: [this video]