This looks like an interesting project, coming from another minority language - Raku - I can see how dogfooding like this is a great way to try and help Julia break into the Python hegemony (yawn) esp. in academic circles. otoh, I am not sure that a pure play Julia notebook thing is long run better than a pure play Python thing (Jupyter ofc).
Yet notebooks are a vital angle for any scripting language. So I guess I would like to see a language neutral notebook platform with pluggable kernels. Meantime Jupyter does that pretty well and, with Raku Inline::Python support for pip modules can be a lot of fun with a Raku kernel, especially with LLM chatbook use cases.
As I recall, Pluto really got into the spotlight, pre-pandemic with the course "Introduction to Computational Thinking with Julia", which as I remember went kinda viral (or maybe just in my bubble)
It was a nice course, I did the first few weeks before life got in the way. It looks like they did one more in 2020 with a focus on COVID:
I would love Pluto but am completely put off by the output of a command being shown above the command that creates it. Sure, maybe the whole notebook is reactive, and I shouldn't care, but I still see Pluto as producing something close to a document or web page, which I want to read from top to bottom, and can't do with Pluto. This single feature/problem has kept me away from Pluto
I mean, there is nothing wrong with state, per se, and yes, this Excel-ish paradigm is awesome.
Although: Most Excel power users have automatic calculations disabled. Why? They want to control when full calculations. If you know that you want to change three things, you can change three things (in the correct order, which you - fair enough - must know), then calculate the rest (F9 in Excel, recalc below in Jupyter if - fair enough - your notebook is in topological order).
In Pluto, you sort of rely on your calculations being quick.
For me, the worst part about Jupyter is not that the cells don't automatically recalculate (I can handle pressing recalc below), but that the output is affected by the order you run the cells in. With Jupyter, there are many situations where to re-run the cell you also have to first re-run all the cells above that one, and it doesn't tell you which ones. Automatic recalculation can be disabled even in reactive notebooks.
Pluto has been quite nice for me to use over the last few years and I even host notebooks using the SliderServer to let others run analysis and examples from the web.
These days it is so easy to just build a full fledged react website with interactive components served locally, personally I just stopped trying to build language specific UIs.
I think of reactive notebooks as a visual REPL for your particular language. If they compete with anything, it's more with dashboarding software than with React.
I like Pluto, what is a small annoyance is it creates a new environment in each session and does not reuse by default the root (system) one. But it is easy to fix with a preamble.
Yet notebooks are a vital angle for any scripting language. So I guess I would like to see a language neutral notebook platform with pluggable kernels. Meantime Jupyter does that pretty well and, with Raku Inline::Python support for pip modules can be a lot of fun with a Raku kernel, especially with LLM chatbook use cases.
https://raku.land/zef:bduggan/Jupyter::Kernel
It was a nice course, I did the first few weeks before life got in the way. It looks like they did one more in 2020 with a focus on COVID:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-s190-introduction-to-computat...
Although: Most Excel power users have automatic calculations disabled. Why? They want to control when full calculations. If you know that you want to change three things, you can change three things (in the correct order, which you - fair enough - must know), then calculate the rest (F9 in Excel, recalc below in Jupyter if - fair enough - your notebook is in topological order).
In Pluto, you sort of rely on your calculations being quick.