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by spacedome 1978 days ago
You absolutely can use regular jupyter notebooks for julia! Pluto has some advantages, like being stored as a normal julia file. The julia startup time issues affect both.
1 comments

> being stored as a normal julia file.

Oh, man, this is indeed a major feature. My main point of friction with jupyter notebooks is the stupid json ipynb format. Why can't it be just a regular language file with comments?

>My main point of friction with jupyter notebooks is the stupid json ipynb format. Why can't it be just a regular language file with comments?

Have you ever used Jupyter notebooks? They contain code, rendered Markdown, images, plots, video players, widgets, etc.

How do you see a "regular language file with comments" supporting this, instead of the "stupid ipynb format"?

You can use plain text files with Jupyter, too.

> They contain code, rendered Markdown, images, plots, video players, widgets, etc.

The code could be verbatim python code (or whatever language the notebook uses), and the rest could be embedded inside comments. I don't see any problem with that (besides the very concept of "rendered Markdown" being totally out of order). The fact that they are saving it as json by default seems more to be laziness by the developers than a well thought-out solution, that could be just a straightforward serializer.

>and the rest could be embedded inside comments. I don't see any problem with that

Do you mean embedding images and plots inside comments? If yes, please elaborate on how you see that happening in the real world.

>The fact that they are saving it as json by default seems more to be laziness by the developers than a well thought-out solution, that could be just a straightforward serializer.

So, how would that well thought-out solution in the form of a "straightforward serializer" work? I have a flat file, and I want to display images, plots that you can zoom into out of, figures, etc. as comments. How would that happen?

Well you could look at the source for org-mode, which does what Jupyter does but in Emacs, and using plain-text files.

https://github.com/bzg/org-mode

> How would that happen?

At the very least, you could put the whole json stuff inside a comment. It's already plain text, isn't it?

Python supports multi-line strings for this. No need for comments.
>At the very least, you could put the whole json stuff inside a comment. It's already plain text, isn't it?

So instead of having the whole file as JSON, which is lazy and not well thought-out, we'll put all content in JSON, then put that JSON inside a comment in a plain text file. Do I read you correctly?

I feel we're making progress faster than these lazy Jupyter org bandits.

Rmarkdown does this perfectly
Sounds like you want jupytext
Yes. What I really want is that ipynb disappears everywhere forever to be replaced by jupytext or a variant of it.