literary VS mercury

Eh, I think this misses the point of why Jupyter Notebooks are useful, and who is using them.

I agree that in terms of literate programming as Knuth defined it, Notebooks are not great. There are tools to improve that story; I wrote https://github.com/agoose77/literary which at least lets you do a bit more "tangling and weaving" than you can out of the box. It doesn't let you define functions in arbitrary order, or implement fragments of a code block, but it does let you "boil down" a literate representation into something that is zero-cost at runtime and imports. There's also nbdev, although it's not my cup of tea.

The real point, though, is that most data-scientists aren't using (imo) notebooks to write and share libraries of code. Instead, they're using notebooks as semi-reproducible reports. I'm a physicist, and that's what I've been using Jupyter for. For me, Jupyter Notebooks are fantastic - the cell mechanism lends itself to rich-outputs that augment the narrative, and present the information in-line with the code that wrote it.

For me, the biggest gap here is writing _libraries_ that are leveraged in these notebooks. That's why I wrote Literary - to try and resolve some of the pain points that currently require you to use two tools (Jupyter Lab & e.g. PyCharm). I'm not saying it will work for everyone, or solve all of the problems, but for me it's enough to write my analysis as a package, so that's a limited success in my book.

I'm build dashboards in Jupyter Lab. My plotting libraries are Altair, matplotlib, seaborn, Plotly - all work well in notebook.

My favorite is Altair. It provides interactivity for charts, so you can move/zoom your plots and have tooltips. It is much lighter than Plotly after saving the notebook to ipynb file. Altair charts looks much better than in matplotlib. One drawback, that exporting to PDF doesn't work. To serve notebook as dashboard with code hidden, I use Mercury framework, you can check example https://runmercury.com/tutorials/vega-altair-dashboard/

disclaimer: I'm author of Mercury framework https://github.com/mljar/mercury

Web App is using two open-source packages that I've created:

- MLJAR AutoML - Python package for AutoML on tabular data https://github.com/mljar/mljar-supervised

- Mercury - framework for converting Jupyter Notebooks into Web App https://github.com/mljar/mercury

You can run Web App locally. What is more, you can adjust notebook's code for your needs. For example, you can set different validation strategies or evalutaion metrics or longer training times. The notebooks in the repo are good starting point for you to develop more advanced apps.

The GitHub repository https://github.com/mljar/mercury

We are working on open-source web framework Mercury that converts Python notebooks to Web Apps.

It is very opinionated:

- it has no callbacks - we automatically re-execute cells below updated widget

- it has no layout widgets, all input widgets are always in the left sidebar

Thanks to above decisions you don't need to change notebook's code to have web app and fit to the framework.

The simplicity of the framework is very important to us. We also care about deployment simplicity. That's why we created a shared hosting service called Mercury Cloud. You can deploy notebook by uploading a file.

The GitHub repository https://github.com/mljar/mercury

Documentation https://RunMercury.com/docs/

Mercury Cloud https://cloud.runmercury.com

Analysis was done in Jupyter Notebook with Python 3.10, Pandas, Matplotlib, wordcloud and Mercury framework.

Analysis was done in Jupyter Notebook with Python 3.10 kernel, Pandas, Matplotlib, wordcloud and Mercury framework to share notebook as a web application with widgets and code hidden. Gif created in Canva.