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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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/e6e6e4b45d1bed9fc1482412743b8...

Nice that it's Apache 2 licensed too.

Wow, I just found the GitHub Copilot feature too!

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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.

let's go!! so excited to see this get deserved attention

Congrats Myles! Super excited that you all have finally open sourced! I'm gonna start moving my Jupyter notebooks over to this asap. I love that it's all just .py files.

Have you had anyone use Marimo to write production web app code? I've been doing a lot of AI experiments for the new venture, and it's been a pain to have to switch back and forth between .ipynb files and regular py files

People have used marimo for production web apps. They won't get you as far as writing HTML/JS. But great for internal tools or external showcases, tutorials, interactive blogs, etc.

Our friends at SLAC use marimo for their internal exploration experiments and publishing interactive apps. He is an example: https://marimo.io/@public/signal-decomposition

Hi Simon, slightly unrelated question.

I'm a big fan of your work, and as I've learnt a lot from reading your blog posts over the years, I'd be curious to know a bit more about typical use cases for wanting to work with Observable notebooks.

The only reason why I'm using A JavaScript notebook tool (Starboard.gg) is to be able to access cool visualisation packages like Anychart or Highcharts.

Given the hype around Observable notebooks, I feel that I'm missing something.

What makes you decide to start something in an Observable notebook rather than in Jupyter?

Thanks!

I primarily use Observable to build interactive tools, as opposed to Jupyter which I use more for exploratory development and analysis.

Here are some of my Observable notebooks which illustrate the kind of things I use it for:

https://observablehq.com/@simonw/search-for-faucets-with-cli...

https://observablehq.com/@simonw/openai-clip-in-a-browser

Those are both from https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/

https://observablehq.com/@simonw/gpt4all-models provides a readable version of JSON file on GitHub

https://observablehq.com/@simonw/blog-to-newsletter is the tool I used to assemble my newsletter

A killer feature of Observable notebooks for me is that they provide the shortest possible route from having an idea to having a public URL with a tool that I can bookmark and use later.

Congrats OP on launching this, looking forward to dive further in! It's great to see people experimenting in the Reactive + Live Programming space as like you mention, I think it can bring a lot of improvements to how we build software. Did you run into any limitations adopting this model?

> A killer feature of Observable notebooks for me is that they provide the shortest possible route from having an idea to having a public URL with a tool that I can bookmark and use later

Thanks for sharing simon! I'm working on an Open Source Notion + Observable combination (https://www.typecell.org), where documents seamlessly mix with code, and can mix with an AI layer (e.g.: https://twitter.com/YousefED/status/1710210240929538447)

The code you write is pure Typescript (instead of sth custom like ObservableJS) which opens more paths to interoperability (aside from having a public URL). For example, I'm now working to make the code instantly exportable so you can mix it directly into existing codebases (or deploy on your own hosting / Vercel / whatever you prefer).

Thanks for getting back to me, I'll go through the examples you shared.

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