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Comment by rsfern | Hacker News Reader

> By default, cells rerun whenever its code changes or an input reruns, like a spreadsheet!

This is transformational — I’ve been using Pluto.jl a lot lately for prototyping library code and doing data analysis. Now when I work in python I find myself really missing that reactivity. The closest thing I’ve found is streamlit, which is cool but not quite as liberating IMO

Can’t wait to try it!

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>> By default, cells rerun whenever its code changes or an input reruns, like a spreadsheet!

> This is transformational

Just a note, but this has been around for forever in tools and languages like TouchDesigner, vvvv, Max, Pure Data, LabVIEW, with various permutations on the idea.

I've never heard of any of those.

The excellent Live Coding in Python plugin [0] also comes to mind. The space tracer [1] in particular is handy for debugging.

[0]: http://donkirkby.github.io/live-py-plugin/

[1]: http://donkirkby.github.io/live-py-plugin/starting_space_tra...

Cool, thanks for the references! LabVIEW is the only one I’d heard of

I didn’t mean to imply that there’s no prior art (observable also comes to mind), but I’ve just gotten so frustrated lately with how easy it is to make an unsustainable mess in jupyter. Factoring code into modules and auto loading those helps, but it’s still easy to get in trouble with implicit state

RxPy and "Functional Reactive Programming" (Flow Based Programming) also seem related, albeit they are not visual tools.

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