Codepod: A Namespace-Aware, Hierarchical Jupyter for Interactive Development at Scale

Abstract

Jupyter is a browser-based interactive development environment that has been popular recently. Jupyter models programs in code blocks, and makes it easy to develop code blocks interactively by running the code blocks and attaching rich media output. However, Jupyter provides no support for module systems and namespaces. Code blocks are linear and live in the global namespace; therefore, it is hard to develop large projects that require modularization in Jupyter. As a result, large-code projects are still developed in traditional text files, and Jupyter is only used as a surface presentation. We present Codepod, a namespace-aware Jupyter that is suitable for interactive development at scale. Instead of linear code blocks, Codepod models code blocks as hierarchical code pods, and provides a simple yet powerful module system for namespace-aware incremental evaluation. Codepod is open source at https://github.com/codepod-io/codepod.