I had heard of Pluto notebooks but didn't know that they were truly different. The elevator pitch seems to be
Pluto: Jupyter without hidden state.
I can't wait to try it out. I did my thesis work in Julia ~5 years ago but abandoned it afterwards precisely because state management was so painful. At that time, Julia took 30 seconds to start (compile the plotting library), so you basically had to use live sessions, and they had all the usual stateful foot-guns, which made for a very painful overall experience. Performance was still pretty rough last time I tried it (build caching on the libraries didn't happen on install and even post-install wasn't Just Working), but Pluto sounds like a strong enough mitigation to be worth a try!
Adding Plots (or for that matter, Pluto!) to your sysimg with PackageCompiler.jl is a potentially significant QoL improvement on that front. Parallel auto-precompile in 1.6 is also awesome.
Pluto: Jupyter without hidden state.
I can't wait to try it out. I did my thesis work in Julia ~5 years ago but abandoned it afterwards precisely because state management was so painful. At that time, Julia took 30 seconds to start (compile the plotting library), so you basically had to use live sessions, and they had all the usual stateful foot-guns, which made for a very painful overall experience. Performance was still pretty rough last time I tried it (build caching on the libraries didn't happen on install and even post-install wasn't Just Working), but Pluto sounds like a strong enough mitigation to be worth a try!