Hi! Thanks for your interest. marimo is much more than that — unlike traditional notebooks, marimo is "reactive", meaning it models notebooks as dataflow graphs and keeps code an outputs in sync. Moreover, marimo notebooks are not "just notebooks". They can be seamlessly run as interactive web apps or as Python scripts.
I was just thinking about something like this a couple hours ago.
Jeremy Howard (fast.ai, etc) posted a few weeks ago about his new AI class [1] and I was pumped. I went through the fast.ai course a couple years ago and had been wondering if another would ever come out, and the overview of this sounded really interesting. But the first thing the announcement went into was Jupyter Notebooks, and it kept on and on about them and I rolled my eyes. I remember they were my least favorite part of the fast.ai class. They've always felt awkward to me, being used to a code editor and all the functionality it provides, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
I'm sure Jupyter is great for fast iteration if that's what you do all day, but if you spend most of your life in a standard code editor, you really want something that starts from there and adds a bit of interactivity on top, rather than jumping to a completely different concept. I haven't tried marimo yet, but I might give it a shot for my next project.
Maybe. At least that way it doesn't feel like some separate half-baked proprietary code editor from the 90s, which is the vibe I get from Jupyter. But a regular .py file with a couple attributes that can generate notebooks still sounds far nicer, assuming it works fairly seamlessly.
Here is our original ShowHN post that explains what marimo is all about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38971966
Blog that goes deeper: https://marimo.io/blog/lessons-learned