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by goatlover 1798 days ago
Notebooks are the next-gen spreadsheets, except they use programming languages instead of formulas.
2 comments

And they require so much additional setup and processing power that they will never supplant spreadsheets.
Jupyter is a joke compared to spreadsheets, it doesn't auto-recalculate when you edit cells.
Observable does. So does Julia’s Pluto.jl.

You’re not paying attention to the space but recalculating notebooks are gaining popularity.

Things are getting better. I was aware of them, but jupyter is the 600 pound gorilla in this area.

I wouldn't use observable, as you are tied to their web service, and I've had too many companies close to use such a service for important data. Pluto is promising, but (I believe?) Only supports Julia, which is growing but still not that popular, or known.

True, but you have access to whatever Python libraries are installed, and your output is web-based. So you can potentially output anything a browser can display, including interactive 3D graphics and widgets. You also have access to the command line in Jupyter, so you can run whatever shell commands you like.
Not only that, it doesn't even keep track of the calculation graph, so it doesn't know what needs calculating, or in which order to calculate.
yeah, and also it's 1-dimensional; you can only go up or down, never to the right
Because the data is inside a data structure like a table or dictionary that you can output, iterate and map over however you like with the various Python and library methods or functions.