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Comment by davistreybig | Hacker News Reader

Huge fan of Marimo - fixes so many of the annoying problems w/ notebooks

I find Marimo best for when you're trying to build something "app-like"; an interactive tool to perform a specific task. I find Jupyter lab more appropriate for random experimentation and exploration, and documenting your learnings. Each absolutely has it's place in the toolbox, and does it's thing well, but for me at least, there's not much overlap between the two other than the cell-based notebook-like similarity. That similarity works well for me when migrating from exploration mode to app design mode. The familiar interface makes it easy for me to take ideas from Jupyter into Marimo to build out a proper application.

Thanks for the kind words. Many of our users have switched entirely from Jupyter to marimo for experimentation (including the scientists at Stanford's SLAC alongside whom marimo was originally designed).

I have spent a lot of time in Jupyter notebooks for experimentation and research in a past life, and marimo's reactivity, built-in affordances for working with data (table viewer, database connections, and other interactive elements), lazy execution, and persistent caching make me far more productive when working with data, regardless of whether I am making an app-like thing.

But as the original developer of marimo I am obviously biased :) Thanks for using marimo!

I just like the Jupyter Lab overall IDE-like interface. It's really well designed for general random exploration, and works well with Wil McGugan's "Rich" console output library. On the other hand, it's not really at all well suited for building web application type stuff. It's capable of it (with a whole lotta "hackery" and jumping through hoops) but it's not really built for it the way Marimo is. Marimo just feels like the right choice once you want to build a real repeatable end-usery type application for day to day use on a specific task. The widget set seems really well designed in Marimo too. I'm also really pleased with Marimo's usage of the uv Python package tool as well. I fully intend to keep both Marimo and Jupyter within easy reach, as they're both really excellent at what they do.

This is exactly my impression.

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