I haven’t used it, but from looking at Marimo’s examples and docs, I’m not convinced by some of its design choices. The idea that you can run notebook cells out of order is supposed to be a strength, but I actually see it as a weakness. The order of cells is what makes a notebook readable and self-documenting. The discipline of keeping cells in order may be painful, but it’s what makes the flow of analysis understandable to others.

Also, I find the way Marimo uses decorators and functions for defining cells pretty awkward (Although it’s nicely abstracted away in the UI). It looks like normal Python, but the functions don’t behave like real functions, and decorators are a fairly advanced feature that most beginners don’t use.

For me, Quarto notebooks strike a better balance when it comes to generating sharable documents, prototypes, and reports. They’re git-friendly, use simple markup for defining cells, and still keep the clear, linear structure.

However, Marimo might be the best tool for replacing Streamlit apps and “production notebooks” (Although I’d also argue that notebooks should not be in production).