As I recall, Pluto really got into the spotlight, pre-pandemic with the course "Introduction to Computational Thinking with Julia", which as I remember went kinda viral (or maybe just in my bubble)

It was a nice course, I did the first few weeks before life got in the way. It looks like they did one more in 2020 with a focus on COVID:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-s190-introduction-to-computat...

Pluto is great. I use it all the time. If you like the reactivity/reproducibility but are wedded to Python, you might want to check out Marimo, which is also great. [https://marimo.io/]

It too puts the output of a cell above the code so if you're unable to adapt to things that are different it's also probably not for you.

FWIW, Observable's Notebooks (Javascript) work the same way: output above the code that produces it. [https://observablehq.com/]

I too did not like having the output above the code but got over it pretty quickly. For plots, it's arguably better: usually, I want to see the plot before I see the 15 line invocation of some plot command. The thing that bugs me the most about Pluto now is that it really wants you to only have a single evaluating statement per cell. You have to wrap stuff in "block......end" if you want to e.g. define more than one variable in a cell.

This looks like an interesting project, coming from another minority language - Raku - I can see how dogfooding like this is a great way to try and help Julia break into the Python hegemony (yawn) esp. in academic circles. otoh, I am not sure that a pure play Julia notebook thing is long run better than a pure play Python thing (Jupyter ofc).

Yet notebooks are a vital angle for any scripting language. So I guess I would like to see a language neutral notebook platform with pluggable kernels. Meantime Jupyter does that pretty well and, with Raku Inline::Python support for pip modules can be a lot of fun with a Raku kernel, especially with LLM chatbook use cases.

https://raku.land/zef:bduggan/Jupyter::Kernel

I would love Pluto but am completely put off by the output of a command being shown above the command that creates it. Sure, maybe the whole notebook is reactive, and I shouldn't care, but I still see Pluto as producing something close to a document or web page, which I want to read from top to bottom, and can't do with Pluto. This single feature/problem has kept me away from Pluto

Reactive notebooks are so much better. Using Pluto or Livebook makes you realize how inconvenient and illogical Jupyter is in comparison.

Pluto has been quite nice for me to use over the last few years and I even host notebooks using the SliderServer to let others run analysis and examples from the web.

Looking forward to using this[0] with Pluto instead of repl! (They just look so cool)

[0]: https://github.com/JuliaPlots/UnicodePlots.jl

I like Pluto as well, but the project baked in opinionated choices which imo make sense for hosting course notebooks for a class but at the same time make it annoying to use as a tool.

Besides the often commented upon cell outputs that appear above the code and the forced begin/end blocks, Id rather see better control mechanisms for pausing/replaying execution, to have the notebooks play nicely with the existing package environment system instead of being self-contained, and to function outside the browser (eg with VS Code support).

Just used it this week for my university course, was one of those exercises that actually were fun and educative.

These days it is so easy to just build a full fledged react website with interactive components served locally, personally I just stopped trying to build language specific UIs.

I like Pluto, what is a small annoyance is it creates a new environment in each session and does not reuse by default the root (system) one. But it is easy to fix with a preamble.

Are people using Julia in the industries yet? This looks promising.

This is great, but people should realize this is only catching up Wolfram Notebook 10 years ago.

[dead]