spacetimeengine VS jupyterlite

A decade ago when I was interested in General Relativity I wanted to write a simple program to handle symbolic calculations for Einstein field equations (Starting with metric and calculated affine connections, ricci tensor …etc.). Sympy was an option (better because python was the only language I know well) but I found it hard and actually couldn't make it work. I used mathematica which was new for me but did it in a couple of hours. I expanded it later and used it to calculate a lot of things in a black hole paper I published later.

I checked now, and it seems that on this front a lot of development in sympy made it possible that we know how very good libraries built on top of it [1] [2]. There is even now a Jupyter notebook example on schwarzschild metric [3].

[1] https://docs.einsteinpy.org

[2]https://github.com/spacetimeengineer/spacetimeengine

[3] https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/master/examples/intermed...

The JupyterLite Python-compiled-to-WASM build has NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, and SymPy installed; so you can do computer algebra with SymPy in a browser tab.

https://JupyterLite.rtfd.io/

https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/tree/main/py/jupy... :

> Initial support for interactive visualization libraries such as: altair, bqplot, ipywidgets, matplotlib, and plotly

https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howto/extension... :

> We recommend checking out how to create a server extension first

From https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/237#issuec... re: 'micropip':

  %pip install $@

https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/tree/main/recipe...

Re: emscripten fs implementations: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/15041#i... https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/315

Agreed that would be a killer feature. Unzip this package and get a functional Python + Jupyter + scientific (numpy, pandas, scipy, matplotlib) environment.

I have been on-and-off teaching some people Python and the initial setup on-ramp is horrible. Ok, so install Python, now ignore-this-for-now-complications: create a "virtualenv", use this thing called "pip", install these half-dozen things to get a basic notebook (Jupyter + scipy things), install these other half-dozen quality of life things, you should probably also have "conda" for the future, etc. That's a lot of nonsense for someone I am trying to show an alternative to Excel.

My shortcut, "You want to try Python?" approach has been to start with JupyterLite[0] where I can immediately get people coding and delay that pain.

[0] https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite

JupyterLite: a JupyterLab distribution that runs in the browser\ (45 comments)