Netflix Releases Polynote - A Polyglot Jupyter Notebook Variant

Netflix announced that they are releasing a new piece of open source software that they are calling Polynote. Polynote is an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook that includes first-class Scala support, Python and SQL. Looking at the website, it appears to be built on top of Jupyter Notebook.

Their top goals for the project are reproducibility and visibility. You can read the full announcement with examples on Medium.

This looks like an interesting project and I am curious to see how it impacts Project Jupyter. My personal hope is that Netflix's work will be useful to the Python community and perhaps enhance Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab.

I like that it this notebook allows each cell to run a different language out of the box. You can do that with Jupyter Notebook, but doing so is a bit clunky and nowhere near as user-friendly as using a drop-down control like the one that Polynote is using.

It is also interesting that Polynote stores its configuration and dependencies in the notebook's code itself.

Polynote also supports robust data visualization using Vega and Matplotlib.

Check out Polynote here.