An introduction to Pluto

Posted Nov 4, 2020 21:56 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: An introduction to Pluto by NYKevin
Parent article: An introduction to Pluto

But you can use "real" programming language with "real" spreadsheet (I know that because I often do that)… so why the ugly substitute?

An introduction to Pluto

Posted Nov 4, 2020 22:09 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Spreadsheets don't really support scientific visualizations, graphing libraries and TeX rendering.

An introduction to Pluto

Posted Nov 5, 2020 1:03 UTC (Thu) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link] (2 responses)

It’s not an ugly substitute. This is fundamentally a tool for dynamic, on the fly, data analysis and visualization. It’s a tool for supporting scientific research and especially for generating scientific papers in a way that others can interact with the results.

Nuggets of random code stuck to spreadsheets and separate data visualizations with the results pasted in to an eventual test document are in fact an ugly substitue for this, for the job this is intended to do.

It’s like, a “light” scientific computation tool. It’s not for heavy duty number crunching in the sense of high performance computation (often simulation) and “big data”. It’s for light to medium weight computational work and presenting data to people.

If it helps, most of these started as tools for biologists. They need to do a *lot* of data manipulation but most of their stuff isn’t heavyweight physical simulation. It’s data processing, and the data sets aren’t necessarily that large. (Though some are.)

An introduction to Pluto

Posted Nov 5, 2020 1:04 UTC (Thu) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link]

Excuse me, *text* document.

An introduction to Pluto

Posted Nov 5, 2020 1:13 UTC (Thu) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link]

Think of this as a way to produce a scientific paper where someone else can reach in and immediately explore and change the data processing.

A step towards a sort of WYSIWYG editor for scientific papers *including the data processing steps within the scope of the editor*. So I can try a new fit function for the data in a plot and it’s just immediately there in its full context. Or something close to that. And I can do it with *your* paper that you sent me.