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Comment by bernardv | Hacker News Reader

I would not have included Jupyter Notebooks in this list. However, I would not hesitate to include the Pandas library in such a list as it has propelled the democratization of data analysis forward a great deal. I recall the days of having to either cobble together my own data analysis algorithms or having to depend on multiple libraires to get basic things done. Pandas, however, wouldn’t be Pandas without Numpy and ultimately the C/Fortran libraries it was built on.

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> Pandas, however, wouldn’t be Pandas without Numpy and ultimately the C/Fortran libraries it was built on.

I think either numpy/numeric and scipy deserve to be on the list more than Jupyter (and Pandas) since I think they were the fundamental reason that Python took off in physical / data sciences.

Jupyter notebooks brought documented code to a broad audience (I personally use org-mode, but I appreciate that Jupyter can appeal to non-Emacs users).

Pandas is based in concept on R's data frames and dplyr libraries which predate it by a long shot. If you were talking about implementation of data frames, then you would have to include Julia's as well.

From a practical perspective though, SQL has to be a big one - though not often used by people closest to the science.

Even more than that, Jupyter brought literate programming and REPL-style programming to the masses. Those ideas have been present from the dawn of computing (and have seen various proprietary incarnation e.g., Matlab, Mathematica) but it was Jupyter that thrust them to wide audiences. I was glad to see Jupyter mentioned as an important advancement in the scientific computing arena. In addition, for me, the paper was a delight to read. I have met or even collaborated with a number of people interviewed in the article. (I am also an org-mode / babel user.)

org-babel is brilliant but I do find that you have to do a lot of things manually that Jupyter does automatically (manage figures, etc.)

I know that some people here on hackernews don't have a good opinion of Jupyter Notebooks, but I expect them to be a very important step in how we publish scientific papers and experiment with ideas. There are probably other tools that are currently more influential, but the longer term the notebooks are going to replace the traditional papers.

Probably could have been folded into the IPython entry, as that's how many people encounter it.

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