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by ravila4 241 days ago
I haven’t used it, but from looking at Marimo’s examples and docs, I’m not convinced by some of its design choices. The idea that you can run notebook cells out of order is supposed to be a strength, but I actually see it as a weakness. The order of cells is what makes a notebook readable and self-documenting. The discipline of keeping cells in order may be painful, but it’s what makes the flow of analysis understandable to others.

Also, I find the way Marimo uses decorators and functions for defining cells pretty awkward (Although it’s nicely abstracted away in the UI). It looks like normal Python, but the functions don’t behave like real functions, and decorators are a fairly advanced feature that most beginners don’t use.

For me, Quarto notebooks strike a better balance when it comes to generating sharable documents, prototypes, and reports. They’re git-friendly, use simple markup for defining cells, and still keep the clear, linear structure.

However, Marimo might be the best tool for replacing Streamlit apps and “production notebooks” (Although I’d also argue that notebooks should not be in production).
1 comments
dmadisetti 241 days ago
marimo has a quarto extension and a markdown fileformat [1] (marimo check works on this too!). The python fileformat was chosen such that "notebooks" are still valid python, but yes- the format itself is almost an implementation detail to most "notebook" users. Cells _are_ actually callable and importable functions though (you can give them a name), but the return signature is a bit different from what's serialized.

> The discipline of keeping cells in order may be painful, but it’s what makes the flow of analysis understandable to others.

We might have to agree to disagree here, you can still chose to have your notebook in order and something you can be disciplined about. The difference is that a marimo notebook can't become unreproducible the same way a jupyter notebook can, _because_ the order doesn't matter.

But thanks for the feedback!

[1]: https://github.com/marimo-team/quarto-marimo

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