Hi! Thanks for your interest. marimo is much more than that — unlike traditional notebooks, marimo is "reactive", meaning it models notebooks as dataflow graphs and keeps code an outputs in sync. Moreover, marimo notebooks are not "just notebooks". They can be seamlessly run as interactive web apps or as Python scripts.
I was just thinking about something like this a couple hours ago.
Jeremy Howard (fast.ai, etc) posted a few weeks ago about his new AI class [1] and I was pumped. I went through the fast.ai course a couple years ago and had been wondering if another would ever come out, and the overview of this sounded really interesting. But the first thing the announcement went into was Jupyter Notebooks, and it kept on and on about them and I rolled my eyes. I remember they were my least favorite part of the fast.ai class. They've always felt awkward to me, being used to a code editor and all the functionality it provides, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
I'm sure Jupyter is great for fast iteration if that's what you do all day, but if you spend most of your life in a standard code editor, you really want something that starts from there and adds a bit of interactivity on top, rather than jumping to a completely different concept. I haven't tried marimo yet, but I might give it a shot for my next project.
Maybe. At least that way it doesn't feel like some separate half-baked proprietary code editor from the 90s, which is the vibe I get from Jupyter. But a regular .py file with a couple attributes that can generate notebooks still sounds far nicer, assuming it works fairly seamlessly.
I haven’t used it, but from looking at Marimo’s examples and docs, I’m not convinced by some of its design choices. The idea that you can run notebook cells out of order is supposed to be a strength, but I actually see it as a weakness. The order of cells is what makes a notebook readable and self-documenting. The discipline of keeping cells in order may be painful, but it’s what makes the flow of analysis understandable to others.
Also, I find the way Marimo uses decorators and functions for defining cells pretty awkward (Although it’s nicely abstracted away in the UI). It looks like normal Python, but the functions don’t behave like real functions, and decorators are a fairly advanced feature that most beginners don’t use.
For me, Quarto notebooks strike a better balance when it comes to generating sharable documents, prototypes, and reports. They’re git-friendly, use simple markup for defining cells, and still keep the clear, linear structure.
However, Marimo might be the best tool for replacing Streamlit apps and “production notebooks” (Although I’d also argue that notebooks should not be in production).
marimo has a quarto extension and a markdown fileformat [1] (marimo check works on this too!). The python fileformat was chosen such that "notebooks" are still valid python, but yes- the format itself is almost an implementation detail to most "notebook" users. Cells _are_ actually callable and importable functions though (you can give them a name), but the return signature is a bit different from what's serialized.
> The discipline of keeping cells in order may be painful, but it’s what makes the flow of analysis understandable to others.
We might have to agree to disagree here, you can still chose to have your notebook in order and something you can be disciplined about. The difference is that a marimo notebook can't become unreproducible the same way a jupyter notebook can, _because_ the order doesn't matter.
My understanding is it’s just python code with a bit of notebook hints and an idea that gives the notebook experience.
So I didn’t quite catch from the article why ruff and pylons aren’t enough.