Python for Decision Makers and Business Leaders Transcripts
Chapter: Data science in Python
Lecture: Jupyter notebooks
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Most of this work that I just described was done in something called a Jupyter Notebook. These use to be called iPython notebooks but now it's Jupyter
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because it actually runs many other languages. Even though it started out being just Python now you can do things like R and Julia and
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even .NET and C++. It's kind of everything. So it's these notebooks that have this visual look here. You can see the Lorenz differential equations.
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There's a little description. You can write a little bit of code and a little more description, a little bit more of code
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and oh, now you get a graph that you can interact with with these little widgets. It's really really great for exploring data when you don't
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know exactly what you need to do. You get the data and you start looking it at it and you slice it this way and that way.
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And you ask questions, and you see it. Very very different experience than writing the Flask web application.
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In Flask we broke it into a bunch of little files we put them all together. We wrote a little code here, called over to that thing
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passed it off to that. Notebooks are these one thing here that you can work with and you just kind of explore it as you go.
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You don't even necessarily know where you're going to end up. At least the early stages of much data science
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is done this way. You probably don't productize it. You don't take this notebook and make it a web service that then can be consumed by an application.
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You probably go and convert it over to that Flask type of story that we were talking about. But at the beginning, the exploration and
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the explanation side, it's with these notebooks. Oh, and this also happens to be similar to things like Matlab or R Studio.
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Unlike say Matlab or Mathematica, instead of costing thousands of dollars, no. This costs, well, nothing. It's free.
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I's supported by NSF, National Science Foundation in the United States and a bunch of other organizations
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as well as all the scientists working on this project as part of their research. It's open-source, just like Python.