Fons Van Der Plas Pluto jl – reactive and reproducible notebooks for Julia | JupyterCon 2023

Slides: https://gist.github.com/fonsp/b004319fbe728a5fc661ce8ac89c1ac4 Pluto.jl is a new, open source notebook programming environment for Julia, written in Julia and JavaScript. Our mission is to make Julia more accessible and fun! 🎈 In this talk, we would like to introduce Pluto.jl to the JupyterCon audience, and we will talk specifically about our approach to reproducibility and reactivity. While Pluto.jl is not directly connected to the Jupyter ecosystem, we think that our position (Julia-only, beginners-first) has led to new discoveries and solutions that are exciting to discuss! Reproducibility 1 – Package Management We see package management as one of the major hurdles for beginner programmers. It can be intimidating to set up an environment to start programming, but it is especially difficult to set it up in a reproducible way. We want to flip this paradigm: a simple, reproducible environment should be the default, and more advanced users can set up an environment themselves. As a whole, 'scientific computing' has an awful onboarding process, and we scare away so many creative and wonderful people before they are able to contribute. Let's fix that! One of our goals is to make notebooks reproducible by default. Each notebook file (or HTML export) contains the Manifest.toml file that can be used to exactly recreate the package environment. When you open a Pluto notebook file, the embedded package information is used to automatically recreate the package environment that was used to write it. A second big feature is automatic package management: instead of a terminal interface, packages are automatically installed and removed as they are used in code. We show package GUI inline in code, and we relay installation progress to the user visually. As a user, it feels like you can simply import any package you want (we even autocomplete all registered package names!), and Pluto takes care of installation and reproducibility. Reproducibility 2 – Reactivity Plut