Hi yoz, Stencila dev here. Thank for your interest. We're definitely still around!
Development of the frontend has indeed slowed down while we focus on more lower-level "backend" tools for research reproduciblity (e.g. https://github.com/stencila/dockter).
But were currently recruiting for a frontend designer and an engineer. So will be definitely be getting back to the interfaces soon!
Just a quick word of thanks for SheetJs from a Stencila dev! All the "mindnumbing testing and grinding work that honestly no one really wants to do" is obvious and much appreciated. Your efforts are so important for the ensuring interoperability but are often not recognised because they are "in the backend".
Thanks for the feedback. Comments and "track changes" are a commonly requested feature, important for collaboration, and certainly something we want to implement!
Hi, Stencila dev here, thanks for the feedback. There are several modular components that make up Stencila. The user interface modules are indeed built using Javascript, and Node.js is used in a number of places including the desktop and CLI apps and format converters. But for code execution, Stencila does not rely on Node, and users can use R, or Python or SQL.
> Reproducible research depends on reproducible execution, which depends on a reproducible environment, which depends on a reproducible set of libraries and frameworks.
Completely agree. We are trying to make it easy for people to use reproducible libraries and environments. To this end, we are developing Nix environments (a highly reproducible way of defining computing environments) which include Stencila "execution contexts" for R, Python etc with standard libraries included. These environments can be connected to the user interface. See https://github.com/stencila/images/ for more details.
Hi, Stencila dev here. In my opinion, Stencila is not ready for daily usage. But we are looking for beta testers who are willing to put up with bugs and crashes and help us shape the framework. We have converters, based on Pandoc, which are able to convert to both PDF and Latex - although they are also in preliminary development.
Hey, yeah it's all open. The Dockerfile is here: https://github.com/stencila/stencila/blob/master/docker/ubun... I'm no expert, but it seems to be doing the job. Would appreciate any suggestions you might have! I'd like to make it smaller i.e. use a smaller base image.
just one comment - your entire js is basically building a reactive workflow through vanilla js. it is a very commendable piece of work!
however, I'm wondering if using Reactjs+Redux would not reduce the amount of js by many orders of magnitude. You would get all your reactive processing for free.
Hey, that's really cool, thanks for the link. Right now you can't do that...but give us a few weeks. We are planning to implement conditional cell formatting using CSS i.e. cell CSS styles as a function of R expressions https://github.com/stencila/stencila/issues/97. Once that is done, it would be fun to see if we could create these types of pretty picture.
Absolutely. I think it is the rapid prototyping aspect of spreadsheets that is perhaps the most powerful. For analysing large amounts of data they are obviously not great. But they excel (pardon the pun) at providing an environment in which to quickly formulate and visualise numerical models - because they are reactive so you can see what happens when you change inputs - without having to recompile, or manually rerun code.
Development of the frontend has indeed slowed down while we focus on more lower-level "backend" tools for research reproduciblity (e.g. https://github.com/stencila/dockter).
But were currently recruiting for a frontend designer and an engineer. So will be definitely be getting back to the interfaces soon!