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Deepnote, a Jupyter alternative, is going open source

deepnote.com

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Re: Deepnote, a Jupyter alternative, is going open source

#31

What’s these folks relationship to Jupyter? I guess they must be some of the really prominent Jupyter developers? Otherwise declaring their system the successor to such a widely used tool seems pretty presumptuous.

Just people working at a moderately successful startup, frustrated that they've created a niche product.

Re: Deepnote, a Jupyter alternative, is going open source

#32
post #10

Are there any other people who hate notebooks? Give a plain old script anytime. Run and edit anywhere without extra packages or even a Web browser.

I have no real qualms with the idea of a notebook, as long as it's not adding a lot of custom magic. I should be able to share what I'm working on, iterate in a notebook with someone, then extract it into a standalone program without much thought.

One issue is that very often the "magic" happens in imported modules, so you can't really see what is happening unless you drop down to a text editor anyway. Then there is the infamous issue of modules not automatically reloading even when rerunning the Notebook.

Re: Deepnote, a Jupyter alternative, is going open source

#34
Lot's of notebooks floating around.

I love notebooks, I use them all the time for teaching, writing (all of my books are written in notebooks), EDA, model development, and more. I've spoken at Jupytercon.

Having said that, I've never played around with other notebook implementations (ok, I've used IPython Notebook, Jupyter Notebook and Lab, Google Colab, ein (emacs), Jupyter in Vscode, and Notebook (.py) files in Vscode).

I've seen Joel's rant about notebooks, and they do have drawbacks.

But I would rather push better programming practices (chaining pandas, using functions, rearranging cells) than have dependent cells written in the horrible piecemeal style that I see all around the industry.

My biggest issue with notebooks is JSON. I've used Jupyter to get around it for years, and now many LLMs are decent at writing Jupyter JSON.

Re: Deepnote, a Jupyter alternative, is going open source

#37
post #8

I’m not familiar with Deepnote, but I have quite a lot of experience with Jupyter, and if someone were to ask me if there are more modern alternatives I would immediately point them to marimo ( https://marimo.io/ ). For me marimo is already a successor to Jupyter, it has replaced it entirely for me.

Yup, Marimo seems perfectly gittable and Deepnote looks more of the status quo. > Human-readable format: The .deepnote YAML format replaces .ipynb's messy JSON with clean, version-control and human-friendly structure for projects and notebooks. You can organize multiple notebooks, integrations, and settings into a single .deepnote project for better structure and collaboration. https://marimo.io/blog/python-not-json

I confess that picking yaml doesn't feel safe to me. As much as it annoys people, fenced formats are the way, here. And if you aren't careful, you are going to recreate XML. Probably poorly.

Re: Deepnote, a Jupyter alternative, is going open source

#39

I’m not familiar with Deepnote, but I have quite a lot of experience with Jupyter, and if someone were to ask me if there are more modern alternatives I would immediately point them to marimo ( https://marimo.io/ ). For me marimo is already a successor to Jupyter, it has replaced it entirely for me.

x2 to marimo, please try it if you haven't.

I never really liked Jupyter. I've built a couple of "notebooks", as they have come to be known the days, much better than Jupyter and still switched to marimo, eventually. Quite similar to what I wanted to have.

Re: Deepnote, a Jupyter alternative, is going open source

#40
> Teams need notebooks that are reactive, collaborative, and AI‑ready

reactive: this matters, but all the alternatives have it

collaborative: this matters very little in the Figma / Google Docs sense of collaborative in practice. It's very rare you want two people working on the same notebook at the same time. What you really want is git style version control.

AI‑ready: you want something as close to plain python (which is already as AI-ready as it gets) as possible.

if you're measuring across these dimensions, I'd go with marimo.

marimo is saved as plain .py files, easy to version control and has a reactive model.

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