🎉 Introducing Niex — interactive Elixir code notebooks built with Phoenix LiveView

Over the past year, I’ve become throughly convinced that Elixir is the language of the future (I’ve written about it previously here & here). And as I’ve worked with Elixir more & more, it’s become my go-to language for just about everything. For example, I’ve started using it in some data analysis and other exploratory applications where I found myself needing something more than Elixir’s default iex REPL. In order to keep track of long chains of data loading & manipulations, I was copy/pasting commands from text files, writing data out to intermediate files, etc — there must be a better way!

I found myself wishing for something like Jupyter, but that I could easily interface with my own native Elixir code. So I started building Niex: an interactive code notebook for Elixir. Niex lets you organize code, data and text content in a persistent notebook that you can save for later use and share with others. It’s great for data analysis and other applications where you need to keep track of lots of input & output, visualize results and save your work between sessions.

Here’s a quick sample of Niex in action:

Niex is similar to Jupyter notebooks commonly used with Python (and other language backends, including Elixir) but it’s written in native Elixir, so it’s easy to setup and to integrate with your existing Elixir code. You can even embed it in your own projects simply by including it as a dependency.

So if you’re using Elixir now and want a richer REPL experience, or if you’re new to Elixir and just want to take the language for a spin, give Niex a try — check out Niex on GitHub!