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Comment by impulser_ | Hacker News Reader

I would suggest to anyone to download Livebook and test it out, even if you don't know Elixir or Erlang. You can do so much with it. I even use it for things outside of programming due to it being pretty much a markdown notebook that you can run code inside of.

It's one of my favorite tools.

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For linux the easiest way to download livebook is with docker [1] or maybe with fly.io [2].

Installing it directly is a bit complicated if you are not familiar with it. I wish linux also had Desktop app like mac.

[1]: https://github.com/livebook-dev/livebook#docker

[2]: https://fly.io/launch/livebook

I managed to install it with devbox (nix under the hood), works very well !

That's really cool! Was it as simple as running `devbox add livebook@latest`? Or did you need to configure it in any way?

To do so much with it you need to know Elixir or Erlang ;)

You actually don't. You can use smart cells which lets you do a lot without actually coding. You can transform data, build charts, run AI model and more all without writing code.

You might have to Google how to read a file in Elixir, but you don't actually need to know Elixir.

In the future, you won't even need to know that to use it.

Ah. I never actually looked into smart cells.

Mind blown.gif

Fwiw, I’ve been using Elixir professionally for 5 or so years and even created a few open source libraries. Never once had to touch Erlang.

Or, not and. Livebook just added Erlang cells.

Erlang is very nice. I prefer it for writing libraries nowadays. It’s much easier to use Erlang from Elixir than the other way around.

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