Respond to paper on notebook pain points

[jedbrown]

This paper is not specifically focused on educational modes of use, but is more carefully done than some well-known grumbling and blogging about notebooks. It would be useful to put it in the context of limitations/when not to use notebooks.

https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/pubs/Chattopadhyay2020CHI_NotebookPainpoints.pdf

[dsblank]

We could at least have a "Further Reading" set of pointers and include such reports. To many of the "pain points" I would respond: "you are using it for something it wasn't designed for." Some of these points remind me of the early days of another open, free format: HTML. What solved some of those issues? Public pressure, not technology.

[jedbrown]

I was thinking perhaps this reference could be worked into an expansion of our "notebook hygiene" section. I think it takes a combination of tooling and communication of best practices in both the HTML/JS and notebook realms. With regard to the paper, I think many of the complaints are not really caused by the notebook environment, and in some cases, are worse without notebooks (which are an abstraction intermediate between a REPL and a standard development environment in which you execute a new process each time you test).