Notebooks as reusable Python programs

marimo is free and open source, available on GitHub. This blog post is also accompanied by a YouTube video. In a previous post, on lessons learned redesigning the Python notebook, we wrote: A lot of important work happens in notebooks — research, large scale experimentation, data engineering, and more. But this kind of work should be treated as Python software, and it shouldn’t be done in error-prone JSON scratchpads. In that post we described design decisions that allowed us to create a new kind of notebook (marimo), one that blended the best parts of interactive computing with the maintainability, reusability, and interoperability of software. Part of our solution was to represent notebooks as Python programs — not just as flat scripts, but as reusable modules. In this post, we dive deep into our representation of notebooks as Python files — showing how our file format makes notebooks versionable with Git, importable as modules, testable with pytest, executable as scripts, and mu ... Read full article.