Enforce a top-down order of execution

[jobevers]

Is it possible to force a top-down order for cell execution? New cells to execute would only be at the bottom of them notebook and existing cells would essentially be immutable. Maybe if a user wanted to edit or re-execute a cell, a copy could be made at the bottom and that new cell could be executed.

Doing this makes a notebook reproducible. The console has this behavior and its definitely nice being able to know when and what code was run.

[takluyver]

If you did that, isn't it essentially just a console?

[Madhu94]

You can take a look at nodebook - https://github.com/stitchfix/nodebook

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On 18-Jan-2018 2:03 AM, "Thomas Kluyver" ***@***.***> wrote: If you did that, isn't it essentially just a console? — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#3229 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AImSDCd9OGTHy6OXcWR-zfIljFvcRcbUks5tLlk0gaJpZM4RhzS0> .

[takluyver]

Oh neat, I hadn't seen that before. :-)

[jobevers]

@Madhu94 that's awesome! Thanks! I'll give it a shot and see if its a good solution.

This sentence: "This prevents messy and difficult to maintain out-of-order execution which frequently occurs in vanilla Jupyter notebooks where each cell modifies the global state." captures exactly the problem I was looking for a solution for.

This also outlines the issue in more depth: https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2017/07/26/nodebook/

[jobevers]

Looks like I'm not the only one who has this concern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U
and https://twitter.com/jakevdp/status/935178916490223616?lang=en

I'm re-opening as nodebook didn't really provide much of satisfactory solution and I think it would be better if supported natively by the notebook.