Re: [babel] Future of Org-babel?

["Eric Schulte" <schulte.eric@gmail.com>]

Thanks for the idea!

Xiao-Yong Jin <xj2106@columbia.edu> writes:

[...]

> I am thinking of something similar to the 'notebook'
> interface in Mathematica.  We can present data, code and
> analysis results in a consistent and structured way, thanks
> to org-mode.

Yes, this is a great idea.  This has been voiced before in reference to
Sage[1] a python mathematical "notebook" which allows for interactive
editing.  I think of it as the interactive alternative to static code
blocks in Org-mode files, sort of a REPL for Org-babel.  I'm not sure
what the actual interface would look like or feel like, and I'd love to
hear suggestions.

> And in addition, we can use all kinds of different languages that
> org-babel supports, automatically generates tables and graphs on the
> fly as we execute different code blocks.  This requires a clean and
> easy way to propagating information through different languages in
> org-babel.

Org-babel does have a means for moving information and variables between
different languages (with emacs-lisp as the lowest common denominator).
I agree this would be exciting.

My pie-in-the-sky extension of this dream would be to have Org-babel
firmly ground in some virtual machine (maybe Guile's if Emacs is ported
to Guile), in such a way that the byte-code of the VM becomes the lowest
common denominator of all Org-babel languages.  This would allow for
seamless integration of languages which compile to run on the VM, and
for all other languages this would provide a great speed/efficiency
boost over Emacs Lisp.  I should disclaim that without having given this
much serious though I could be missing some critical road blocks.

Cheers -- Eric

> In this sense, org-babel can be an advanced interface of comint-mode,
> or even replace it.  Imagine running several different inferior
> interpreters, like shell, python, haskell, gnuplot, (i)maxima, octave
> and etc, but variables can be shared between these processes, and all
> the code and extra texts are stored in one org-mode file, which is
> also the only file you have to work on.
>
> This is my dream about org-babel.  Hope it comes true,
> someday.
>
>> Thanks,
>> --Nate
>
> Thanks,
> Xiao-Yong

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://www.sagemath.org/