VizierDB, a Data-Centric Notebook

Wow, this looks interesting. A nice departure from Jupyter. It resembles Polynote, superficially, but is funded by the US National Science Foundation instead of Netflix OSS the way Polynote is. Interested in taking it for a spin.

Random thoughts:

I have nothing against Jupyter or JupyterLab, and use them regularly. However, the promise of truly polyglot notebook tools like Polynote is so high. I’ve never done a non-trivial data analysis in a single language/tool. Inevitably, there’s a great library for doing X in some other language from the one you started the analysis using, and you really want to do X without trying to rewrite it from the ground up. It’s been common for me to bounce between two or more of scala, python, sage, R, and KNIME in a single project.

I’ve been tinkering with Quarto, and while I like it a lot and the flexibility of its output formats is amazing, it’s a bit stiff the way Jupyter is when it comes to using multiple languages in one project. It’s also more tailored for publishing as opposed to being a notebook where you tinker. Cocalc is great and has amazing features, but it’s expensive if you pay for it and I’m unsure whether their docker container for self hosting is going to survive forever. I do like Polynote, but I don’t like that it looks to be supported largely by a corporation. So, the search goes on.

⤋ Read More