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Comment by mloncode | Hacker News Reader

Hello! Hamel here, author of the original post. I'm surprised to see this on the front page of HN! Anyways, feel free to AMA!

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It's great to learn that you are collaborating with Posit (previously RStudio)! I love where Quarto is going. I use it even in VSCode.

Yes Quarto is one of my favorite tools. My blog (the topic of this thread) is made with Quarto!

Jupytext provides a system for version controlling notebooks, code reviewing them, and using them in the context of a larger Python project, without imposing any constraints on the larger project, because Jupytext saves notebooks as plain .py files.

I ended up choosing Jupytext for a personal project because it seemed less complex than nbdev. (I never made it through the 90 minute nbdev introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7zS8Ld4_iA).

Are there advantages of nbdev over Jupytext that I'm missing out on?

Yes, nbdev is a system that "compiles" notebooks to python scripts, tests and documentation all from one source of truth. Jupytext cannot do this (nor was it designed to)

I think you’re right that commercialization today doesn’t make sense, but I feel confident that future tooling/products will draw on aspects of nbdev and will owe you and others some gratitude.

To that end, have you happened to notice some of nbdev’s design choices bleed into adjacent tooling? Which pieces do you hope to endure and take new life in future projects?

What’s the biggest barrier keeping larger audiences from developing in this “literate” manner?

I’ve been a follower of the design philosophy of nbdev for a long time, though admittedly never got to use it. Perhaps now is the time! Cheers

Excellent comment and question. Re: commercializing nbdev, this path didn't seem to make sense to me personally (for reasons I outlined), but they very well could make sense for others.

But I'm with you, I really like many of the ideas presented in nbdev and feel like they have legs. I don't think those ideas should be abandoned or thrown away. Posit (https://posit.co) is developing products that draw from many of the ideas in nbdev - infact we are working with them - and I think the directions they are pursuing are very promising.

However, if you have ideas on how to make tools in the space that draw on these ideas, I encourage you to do so. I will even support you to the best of my ability if you decide to.

Have you considered approaching Anaconda? This is right up their alley.

Good question! Yes we did talk to Anaconda (we talked to Peter Wang), and they seemed interested in related but slightly different approaches. Some of their forays into exploratory programming are pyscript https://pyscript.com/, the also acquired python anywhere https://www.pythonanywhere.com/, which is sort of like Wordpress for Python developers!

We ended up partnering with Posit (formerly RStudio) a bit more on this at this was a bit more natural in terms of alignment of product and vision. You should definitely keep an eye on Posit (https://posit.co/) to see what they come up with in this space.

I don't think there was an opportunity to "be acquired" (not sure if that was what you were asking) because we didn't get far enough down the commercialization path to justify that.

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