We had this kind of workbook 20 years ago in VW with mathematical formulae and graphics (plot) embedded. What we did was to avoid continous scrolling of the whole document, but rather have the plan of the document on the left pane of the notebook (just an indented tree like word navigation mode), and the text on the right pane for only the currently selected chapter (in a way, it's a lot like the source code browser). This way, no need to compose very large Text in Smalltalk (I also doubt our editors really scale). Then we could output a static view in PostScript or LaTeX.
The greatest limitation IMO was not really the UI, but the principle of the Notebook itself: we soon needed to access the results of previous chunks of code, and we implemented this with an environment (understand some global variables). >From software quality POV, working with such global vars is very disappointing and does not really scale either. The second limitation of the workbook is that, while it's very good for small projects (like maybe we can have in school), it's not the right tool for producing documents with a synthesis of the results, which remain the main added value of humans, so which was what we were asked for. However I'm still curious how far we can go with those notebooks, because the idea is seducing. Maybe it was our own usage which was bad... 2014-07-15 15:31 GMT+02:00 Goubier Thierry <thierry.goub...@cea.fr>: > > > Le 15/07/2014 15:19, Stefan Marr a écrit : > > Hi: >> >> On 15 Jul 2014, at 13:33, Goubier Thierry <thierry.goub...@cea.fr> wrote: >> >> I'm scanning a bit among scientific / computation languages (including >>> GUIs) and I'd like to know if some work has been done on interactive >>> notebooks gui concepts? >>> >>> I’m thinking of something like: http://ipython.org/notebook.html >>> >> >> Just another example for R, based on knitr: http://ramnathv.github.io/ >> rNotebook/ >> > > Thanks (and in R). > > Thierry > -- > Thierry Goubier > CEA list > Laboratoire des Fondations des Systèmes Temps Réel Embarqués > 91191 Gif sur Yvette Cedex > France > Phone/Fax: +33 (0) 1 69 08 32 92 / 83 95 > >
