jupyterlite VS jupytext

The JupyterLite Python-compiled-to-WASM build has NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, and SymPy installed; so you can do computer algebra with SymPy in a browser tab.

https://JupyterLite.rtfd.io/

https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/tree/main/py/jupy... :

> Initial support for interactive visualization libraries such as: altair, bqplot, ipywidgets, matplotlib, and plotly

https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howto/extension... :

> We recommend checking out how to create a server extension first

From https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/237#issuec... re: 'micropip':

  %pip install $@

https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/tree/main/recipe...

Re: emscripten fs implementations: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/15041#i... https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/315

Agreed that would be a killer feature. Unzip this package and get a functional Python + Jupyter + scientific (numpy, pandas, scipy, matplotlib) environment.

I have been on-and-off teaching some people Python and the initial setup on-ramp is horrible. Ok, so install Python, now ignore-this-for-now-complications: create a "virtualenv", use this thing called "pip", install these half-dozen things to get a basic notebook (Jupyter + scipy things), install these other half-dozen quality of life things, you should probably also have "conda" for the future, etc. That's a lot of nonsense for someone I am trying to show an alternative to Excel.

My shortcut, "You want to try Python?" approach has been to start with JupyterLite[0] where I can immediately get people coding and delay that pain.

[0] https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite

JupyterLite: a JupyterLab distribution that runs in the browser\ (45 comments)

Jupytext (https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext) has been designed exactly for this

jupytext is your friend.

So if you run your own jupyter server, -jupy+text can be a great workflow : it takes your notebook synchronized with other formats (python file, makdown, ...), so you can edit your py/md file with neovim, and refresh the browser to execute the notebook.

Automatically convert ipynb files to py when saving them on JupyterLab

I don't use Jupyter so I don't know for sure, but on a quick glance you might want to look at https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext to see if that could help at all.

The format is only partially invented, it follows Jupytext [0], but adds support for cell metadata. There is no obvious way to get that in fenced codeblocks, especially with the ability to spread it over multiple lines so it plays well with version control.

One more consideration is that it's not "Markdown with code blocks interspersed", one might as well use plaintext or AsciiDoc.

Of course there are tradeoffs.. I wish I had more time to work on it.

[0]: https://github.com/gzuidhof/starboard-notebook/blob/master/d...

[1]: https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext

Using jupytext (allows you to open .md files as notebooks) + jupyter gives you pretty much the same experience. The main issue is that the cell's output will be discarded. To fix it, you can use ploomber to generate an output HTML, so the workflow goes like this:

First, the format. The ipynb format does not play nicely with git since it stores the cell's source code and output in the same file. But Jupyter has built-in mechanisms to allow other formats to look like notebooks. For example, here's a library that allows you to store notebooks on a postgres database (I know this isn't practical, but it's a great example). To give more practical advice, jupytext allows you to open .py files as notebooks. So you can develop interactively but in the backend, you're storing .py files.