There are a lot of these tools to somehow "fix the reproducibility crisis of notebooks".
Yet from my experience, you quickly learn to "restart kernel and run all" before sharing to make sure everything is good.
All but the most novice users get caught by the "out of order cells" trap, and those will
1) not use anything that adds complexity, because by definition they are novices
2) fall in any other trap on their way because anyway that's how you learn
Thus, IMHO, these flow tools are only seen as useful by _real devs with savior syndrome_, pushing dev solution to exploratory research users, and that will never catch on.
I like marimo and I would probably use it if it weren't for years of muscle memory. That said, I don't like this reproducibility crisis story either. Notebooks are for exploration. It is okay if they are messy. If the tool I am using doesn't get in the way of my process but instead makes it fast enough then it is already doing its job. Once you are done it is up to you to let it die, make sure it is something you can go back and iterate on it, or package it and make it usable elsewhere.
What kind of muscle memory is holding you back? We recently added support for Jupyter-style command mode in keyboard shortcuts [1]. We're currently rewriting our VS Code extension to feel native, similar to how Jupyter feels in VS Code.
Ah that's great to hear. For me it is mostly the command mode. Is it only create / copy / paste for now? Can I also do the same for move / split / delete / undelete?
I compare it to day trading, where you always close out your position at the end of the day, and never leave anything running overnight. "Restart kernel and run all" when I finish a lab session. Assume that I might not come back to it for a long time, and that it won't be fresh in my mind.
It's harder when some of your cells took hours to execute, which mine don't. Then I think you should be using data files.
The tools that fix this problem seem to evoke "the cure is worse than the disease." At this point, basic Jupyter notebooks are by far the most reproducible way I've ever worked.
Thanks for the comments. I'm the original creator of marimo.
Habitually running restart and run all works okay for very lightweight notebooks, but it's a habit you need to develop, and I believe our tools should work by default. It doesn't work at all for entire categories of work, where computation is heavy and the cost of a bug is high.
From the blog, you will see that reactive execution not only minimizes hidden state, it also enables rapid data exploration (far more rapid than a traditional notebook), reuse as data apps, reuse as scripts, a far more intelligent module autoreloader, and much more.
marimo is not just another Jupyter extension, it's a new kind of notebook. While it may not be for you, marimo has been open source for over a year and has strong traction at many companies and universities, including by many who you may not view to be "real devs". The question of whether marimo will catch on has already been resolved :)
I would consider replacing my jupyterlab usage with marimo were it less opinionated about workflow - it offers a lot of benefits that aren't tied to its execution model. I like the editor/interface and the representation as python files for portability, version control, and the ability to import from other notebooks, but I have no interest in changing my workflow (in particular insofar as marimo is restricted compared to python itself). E.g., I want to be able to redefine variables and use star imports in my personal, exploratory notebooks, and I'm happy to retain responsibility for top-to-bottom executability (as in regular python scripts). I would definitely consider marimo if these restrictions could be opted out of if one has reactive execution disabled.
Thanks for the feedback. We decided early on against having a “non-reactive” mode. It would negate many of our core benefits (including importing from other notebooks), and it would also lead to a fragmented ecosystem — if someone shared a notebook with you, your experience with it would depend on whether it was executed in “reactive” or “non-reactive” mode. Still I appreciate the kind words about our editor and file format, and am sorry we can’t accommodate your use case.
Yet from my experience, you quickly learn to "restart kernel and run all" before sharing to make sure everything is good.
All but the most novice users get caught by the "out of order cells" trap, and those will
1) not use anything that adds complexity, because by definition they are novices
2) fall in any other trap on their way because anyway that's how you learn
Thus, IMHO, these flow tools are only seen as useful by _real devs with savior syndrome_, pushing dev solution to exploratory research users, and that will never catch on.