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by wawjgreen 1416 days ago
not sure what the livebook is--the landing page is not sufficiently clear or coherent.
4 comments

> not sure what the livebook is--the landing page is not sufficiently clear or coherent.

The difference between features and benefits. It's good at telling you the features (what it does) but not so much the benefits (why you would use it, how it can help you).

A common issue, but more understandable in this case than most as your average visitor to the Livebook site will likely know they have a need for it already, rather than end up there based on a 'random' link (like this thread).

The headline on the landing page is "Write interactive & collaborative code notebooks in Elixir".

That's pretty clear and coherent to me.

why would i need to do that instead of Jupyter Notebooks?
Because you want to write Elixir instead of Python/R?
I can already do that with IElixir: https://github.com/pprzetacznik/IElixir
> Write interactive & collaborative code notebooks in Elixir

Think Jupyter Notebooks (if you're familiar with the python world), but collaborative and for Elixir.

I think this is a fair analogy, but maybe I'd add that LiveBooks uses MarkDown markupfor the non-code part of the notebook, make it far more readable, and with more visualizations coming in.

For example, recently an addition to add automatically generated sequence diagrams to Livebook Kino (https://github.com/livebook-dev/kino/pull/165). So generate code which shows a supervision tree, and automatically create a visual diagram of the code in one place. Pretty great for learning and explanatory material.

if they had written this in the landing page, i would not have written my rantish comment.
You're correct that it's not really captured in the prose of the article, but the first image does inform you.