Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python

#31

Post by akshayka » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:02 PM UTC

bsdz wrote: post #27

This is a great idea. I'd been planning to create something similar where cells are topologically ordered based on their dependency structure; although I was thinking perhaps to integrate with Jupyter more, eg use their existing kernel web sockets infrastructure. In my mind, one would be able to zoom out and see a graph view where hovering over a node would show its corresponding cell with content / output. Each node…

That sounds really cool! marimo has a dependency graph viewer built-in, but we could definitely improve it. Coloring nodes by execution status, and annotating cells with their variable defs/refs, would be great quality-of-life improvements.

Re: Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python

#32

Post by bluish29 » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:04 PM UTC

aidos wrote: post #25

bluish29 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several problems with this approach, notably you don't get information about specific platform stuff. You don't get information on how these package are installed (conda, mamba..etc). And it does not account for dependincies version conflicts which life very hard.

I don’t understand the platform thing, is that something to do with running on Windows? Why wouldn’t you just pip install? Why bring conda etc into the mix? If you have conflicts then you have to reconcile those at point of initial install - pip deals with that for you. I’ve never had a situation in 15 years of Python packages where there wasn’t a working combination of versions. These are genuine questions btw. I se…

I will try to summarize the complaints (mine at least) in obvious simple points

1- pip freeze will miss packages not installed by pip (i.e. Conda).

2- It does include all packages, even not used in the project.

3- It just dumps all packages, their dependencies and sub-dependencies. Even without conflicts, if you happen to change a package, then it is very hard to keep track of dependencies and sub-dependencies that need to be removed. At some point, your file will be a hot mess.

4. If you install specific platform package version then this information will not be tracked

Re: Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python

#33

Post by elijahbenizzy » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:07 PM UTC

You've built observable but for python. Love it!

Re: Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python

#34

Post by esafak » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:10 PM UTC

Could this be used with MDX or something to embed interactive examples in documentation? That is an underserved use case.

Re: Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python

#35

Post by rurban » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:12 PM UTC

I'll definitely try it out tomorrow! Could fix a lot of problems with my current project.

Re: Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python

#36

Post by mscolnick » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:19 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #28

This is amazing. I'm a big user of both Jupyter notebooks and Observable notebooks ( https://observablehq.com/ ) and the thing I miss most from Observable when I'm using Jupyter is the lack of cell reactivity. You've solved that incredibly well! I also really like that the Marimo file format is just Python. Here's an example saved file from playing around with the intro: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e6e6e4b45d1bed9…

Myles here (other core contributor) -

We are thrilled to see you have such a strong positive reaction. It means a lot coming from you - I initially learned web development using Django and landed my first contracting gig with Django.

I drifted away from writing Python and towards Typescript - but marimo has brought me back to writing Python.

Re: Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python

#37

Post by Beefin » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

we use the jupyter-server kernel gateway api at https://nux.ai would love to explore using marimo's API for code execution

Re: Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python

#38

Post by smacke » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

I'm a big fan of Marimo (and of Akshay and Myles in particular); it's great to finally see a viable competitor to Jupyter as it can only mean good things for the ecosystem of scientific tooling as a whole.

Re: Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python

#39

Post by smacke » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:32 PM UTC

akshayka wrote: post #19

noahlt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, having worked on alternative notebooks before, one of the big implicit features of Jupyter notebooks is that long-running cells (downloading data, training models) don't get spuriously re-run. Having an excellent cache might reduce spurious re-running of cells, but I wonder if it would be sufficient.

We've thought briefly about cell-level caching; or at least it's a topic that's come up a couple times now with our users. Perhaps we could add it as a configuration option, at the granularity of individual cells. Our users have found that `functools.cache` goes a long way. We also let users disable cells (and their descendants), which can be useful if you're iterating on a cell that's close to the root of your noteb…

ipyflow has a %%memoize magic which looks quite similar to %%xetmemo (just without specifying the inputs / outputs explicitly): https://github.com/ipyflow/ipyflow/?tab=readme-ov-file#memoi...

Would be cool if we could come up with a standard that works across notebooks / libraries!

Re: Show HN: Marimo – an open-source reactive notebook for Python

#40

Post by j0e1 » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:33 PM UTC

This is a welcome alternative to Jupyter Notebooks/lab- great work! One thing that would be nice is an ability to see previews on GitHub of the Marimo notebook (like Jupyter Notebook). I am not sure if this is possible given you would have to run the code to see the output.