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by bmitc 1501 days ago
>> By default, cells rerun whenever its code changes or an input reruns, like a spreadsheet!

> This is transformational

Just a note, but this has been around for forever in tools and languages like TouchDesigner, vvvv, Max, Pure Data, LabVIEW, with various permutations on the idea.

4 comments

The excellent Live Coding in Python plugin [0] also comes to mind. The space tracer [1] in particular is handy for debugging.

[0]: http://donkirkby.github.io/live-py-plugin/

[1]: http://donkirkby.github.io/live-py-plugin/starting_space_tra...

Cool, thanks for the references! LabVIEW is the only one I’d heard of

I didn’t mean to imply that there’s no prior art (observable also comes to mind), but I’ve just gotten so frustrated lately with how easy it is to make an unsustainable mess in jupyter. Factoring code into modules and auto loading those helps, but it’s still easy to get in trouble with implicit state

RxPy and "Functional Reactive Programming" (Flow Based Programming) also seem related, albeit they are not visual tools.
I've never heard of any of those.