Project Jupyter was extremely innovative when, back in 2011, they built an open source Notebook on top of the IPython shell (itself an improvement over the Python shell). Notebooks proved an extremely popular tool for literate programming and are widely used today.

They do however come with two major issues:

• They are a nightmare for version control.

The JSON-like format of the .ipynb files used by Jupyter makes versioning a challenge without the use of proprietary tools or hacky back and forth conversions with, for instance, jupytext.

• It is easy to forget to rerun cells in order and publish a non-reproducible notebook.

A study of 10 million notebooks published on GitHub found that 36% of them had been run in a non-linear fashion.

marimo is a new generation of open source notebook for Python that addresses these problems by using a dataflow graph under the hood ensuring that cells remain up to date and using .py as its file format. marimo notebooks also provide excellent interactivity with direct synchronization with the Python kernel. Consequently, these new notebooks have seen a surge in popularity since their launch in 2023.

In this webinar, I will demo the installation and usage of marimo notebooks.