Alternatives

Differences with nbdev

• Use of cell tags instead of comments or magics to dictate exports
• Use of nbconvert machinery to build the pure-Python lib package
• Use of import hooks to import other notebooks
  • Maintains a similar programming model to conventional module development
  • Reduces the need to modify notebook contents during conversion
• Minimal runtime overhead
  • Features like patch are removed from the generated module (& imported notebook source) using AST transformations
• Currently no documentation generation
  • Loosely, the plan is to use existing notebook-book tooling to re-use the existing Jupyter ecosystem

Differences with Knuth

Knuth introduced the tangle and weave programs to produce separate documentation and source code for compilation. Literary differs in treating the notebook as the "ground truth" for documentation + testing, and generating smaller source code for packaging.