I’m too excited to wait so I’ll just offer my 2 cents here:
- I really appreciate the goal statement: turning normal Clojure namespaces into Notebooks. As someone who does no data stuff whatsoever, I can’t use notebooks for my normal day-to-day work.
- The Notebook approach closes the hole that VSCode has: we cannot show a nice HTML popup of the evaluated code results in the main editor.
- I think that the work done in Calva & Portal might help a lot in circling back to the
calva.outputwindow (perhaps making it a web view where the evaluated results are mini-portals?) - and if VSCode ever adds HTML popups, Calva could show mini-portals in there too. - Notebooks have some pretty dangerous buttons like “execute all”, but Clojure code in rich comment forms is written with the assumption that it will be run manually. I definitely have dangerous side effects in my rich comment forms, especially in namespaces that are meant to “patch production”.
- Performance can be problematic if there are so many mini-portal elements on the screen. Perhaps for scalar values (booleans, numbers etc) and definitely for functions, it would be nice if Portal was skipped entirely.
- A riff on the above, sometimes a pretty-printed value is enough, that could probably be provided by Calva rendering the output script to static HTML and having that as an option? Then Portal could be opt-in instead of the default for all evaluations.
Thanks for getting this off the ground, it looks like a great addition to Calva!