The Julia Programming Language
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2021
23:38 · 48K views · Jul 30, 2020
Fons van der Plas introduces Pluto.jl, a reactive notebook for Julia that tracks references between cells and re-runs affected cells when code changes. The talk was given at JuliaCon 2020.
HN recommends it as an enthusiastic demo of spreadsheet-like reactive notebooks, which commenters think new notebook projects should copy.
8 comments from Hacker News
I think notebooks are great for building a presentation / reports of a data exploration, but I agree that they shouldn't represent programs. Rstudio won't export an R-markdown notebook to PDF without rerunning all cells sequentially. It's great for keeping the code "in check", but for things that takes hours to run, it can be quite annoying. I do think most of the problems with notebooks go away if you somehow force sequential running before presenting it to other people. Another really cool take on notebooks are Julia's Pluto Notebooks. Like a spreadsheet, there is no sequence that cells are run in. Everything is updated simultaneously. It's kinda hard to explain, but the JuliacCn presentation on these is absolutely wonderful: this video
The game changer for ordinary technical programming folks from JuliaCon 2020 is the introduction of a new "reactive" notebook, Pluto.jl. "Reactive" means that -- unlike Jupyter -- it automatically updates the whole notebook, like a spreadsheet, when you change a value in any cell. I am a Julia and Jupyter newbie, but I picked up on it easily. Watch the following video made by Pluto's creators: this video Go here for Pluto installation instructions: [LINK] One thing that tripped me up, which is a generic Julia REPL issue: You enter the Julia package manager with "]" on the Julia> command line -- but how do you exit the package manager? Answer: Either Backspace or Ctrl-C.
I think every new notebook project should take ideas from Julia's Pluto: this video Working directly with the source files is just one of the niceties it has.
It is linked in the article, but I would like to draw attention to the wonderful JuliaCon talk presenting Pluto: this video
The closest may be Pluto.jl this video In Pluto plots, calculations get bound to data and when you change that data the effects immediately ripple through. Personally if I work with table data in Julia, I will use it with something like Table Tool [LINK] It lets you view and edit a CSV file. Saving and loading CSV files from Julia is very quick anyway. You can use a couple of key strokes to bring back a previous command. You also got some newer ones such as Tad: [LINK]