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Comment by thetwentyone | Hacker News Reader

I'd also add Pluto notebooks[1], which when deployed[2] powers interactive sites like MIT's Intro to Computational Thinking[3].

I also get a ton of mileage creating Pluto notebooks and sharing the results for others to run or view a static webpage of the results.

1: https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl

2: https://github.com/JuliaPluto/PlutoSliderServer.jl

3: https://computationalthinking.mit.edu/Spring21/

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Shameless plug.

I have been building a blog using Next.js (for static content) with Pluto (for interactive and richer content, inspired from MIT Intro to Computation Thinking).

I think it's a great combination of richness and expressive content which brings the user along with the interactiveness.

Example post: https://zabirauf.dev/blog/notebooks/understanding_std

Source code: https://github.com/zabirauf/blog

P.S: Still dealing with some bugs in deploying PlutoSliderServer so interactivity is broken.

Great idea. I was honestly pretty disappointed by how hard it was to put a blog post I wrote in Pluto onto my static website. I still really think Pluto needs a way to generate static markdown similar to jupyter and maybe create a button to "edit or run this notebook" as an image with a link to some javascript magic with the actual notebook embedded. I ended up having to use iframes which felt far from ideal[1] since the html output is a jumbled mess[2].

[1] https://projects.ansonbiggs.com/posts/2021-08-24-julia-for-m... [2] https://gitlab.com/MisterBiggs/julia-for-matlabbers/-/blob/m...

Whoaaaaaa. It's reactive?? Not sure I'd want that in all situations, but what an incredibly powerful feature.

It's a seriously cool piece of tech.

Nothing will ever kill spreadsheets, but if something did, it would be this.

spreadsheets are the ultimate reactive interface. I wish there were a mashup of the notebook/spreadsheet paradigm that was reactive.

You realize that Pluto is a reactive notebook right?

pluto is not a spreadsheet though.

Observablejs just got support for Excel and Google sheets, which is really interesting and probably the closest thing to an integrated reactive spreadsheet/notebook concept: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/release-notes#cell-80...

ironically, I remember seeing features like what I'm thinking of, which was first spreadsheet I ever used- Wingz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informix_Wingz

it had a mode where you could take portion of your cells and make it flow exactly like a notebook

you can add execution barriers to individual cells for long running processes.

here is a linear algebra class taught in pluto/julia (not mine, but found it on a random google search): https://www.math.hkust.edu.hk/~emarberg/teaching/2020/Math21...

so I think the approach is great at least for education.

the notebooks work automagically in binder! I think people are working on a wasm codegen for julia, which should a killer feature.

Wow, seems like http://observablehq.com/ but for julia, which is exactly what I've been looking for! Thank you

The reactive model is based on that.

https://lwn.net/Articles/835930/

That is pretty cool, and I'll definitely be taking a look (I was actually looking for what Julia was doing in the notebook space just the other day). Also the course seems interesting as well.

But I feel compelled to at least remark on the fact that they call this "revolutionary", which is a bit much and cringe worthy. While it is indeed a nice package, just don't call it revolutionary, when this type of thing has been available either in part or whole in things like Mathematica, MATLAB, LabVIEW for years (decades really) and other notebooks have very nice features as well. It's just MIT can't do anything without a little hubris.

This is so cool. I wish we had open source tools like this when I was in university and used Mathcad and Mathlab.

Edit: I've just tried it and it's quite slow, but I am positive this will improve given more time and development.

Going to add this, good idea!

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