Bonus Drop #29 (2023-10-15): Cracking The Nut

Consuming A New JS Jupyter Kernel

Today's title is a (major) stretch on an older idiom/proverb that ultimately reduces to: “if you desire something good or appealing, you must make the necessary effort to achieve it”. This is quite appropro, too, since today just happens to be where the planet was when your friendly neighborhood hrbrmstr emerged (ref). That does mean you'll be doing most of the work/digging after we introduce the resource.

I’m also using the emergence celebration occasion to riff from “Through the Looking-Glass” and am unlocking the normally paywalled Bonus Drop for all. Unbirthdays are way cooler than birthdays, and I suspect none of my subscribers share this day in common with me. I also suspect the Bonus Drop sponsors won’t mind sharing.

Jupyter Kernel For Deno

Photo by Planet Volumes on Unsplash

Despite not being a fan of Jupyter notebooks, they are useful in a pinch (I mean, we use manure to grow crops, so we can definitely use the digital equivalent of it — Python — for other types of positive production, right?).

Back in September, the Deno folks gave me a reason to keep Jupyter[Lab] around a bit longer than I might have otherwise with their new Jupyter Kernel For Deno.

For the uninitiated, Deno is yet-another JavaScript runtime. It's similar to Node.JS but has many more included batteries. We've mentioned it quite a bit over the past year+, but haven't truly focused on it proper. We'll eventually do that, but if you aren't already playing with Deno, hit up the second link in the previous paragraph and get familiar with it before continuing.

If you've got a local Deno installation, you may need to do:

$ deno upgrade

before heading into the next section.

The v1.37 intro blog has more setup info and basic examples if you want to dig in a bit more, too.

Kicking The Tyres

Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash

Now that Deno is installed to the latest version, and you have Jupyter infesting your system, you can install the new kernel via:

$ deno jupyter --unstable

Once more, v1.37 intro blog does a fine job explaining the initial setup and creation of a new notebook. Lean on it if you’re new to this space. It’s a great resource.

The notebook cells are TypeScript cells, not vanilla JS cells, as Deno inherently groks TypeScript. While I prefer JSDoc type hints over TypeScript-proper, having a typed shim over JS machinations isn't such a bad thing, especially if you're going to use Deno for more data-science-y work.

If you’re not mildly familiar with Deno, I highly suggest running through the “Basics” section of Deno by Example before jumping to the next section. Folks familiar with NPM should also tap this link before progressing.

Drop & Run

Photo by Mitchell Orr on Unsplash

As noted in the preamble, there are Many Happy Returns of the Day for me to tend to. But, you are not being left empty-handed!

I've made a pretty thorough, but short, example of how to use the new Deno kernel to:

• import some JS packages

• load up some JSON data

• create a fake DOM (so we can render things properly)

• build an Observable Plot

• display said plot

Now, one SUPER COOL thing about Deno having a Jupyter kernel is that we can now use it Quarto documents! To that end, I've “code-tools” enabled this Quarto rendered HTML, so you can see the source that generated the document.

Aside: Deno seems like it might just be a better alternative to the OJS runtime that you get out of the box with Quarto, but I'll need to dig into that more to fully stand by the assertion.

For the Notebook fans out there, I've rendered this ipynb to this HTML via the standard nbconvert dance. I also tested the notebook in Jupyter, Jupyter Lab, and the VS Code Jupyter environment. It works great in all those contexts.

FIN

Keep kicking the tyres and give a shout if you end up making something with this new runtime! ☮