I am sad to hear youāre quitting, but I totally understand that sentiment. This is a real issue that many people in the Julia community donāt get. Too much focus on fancy differential neural net stuff, and little focus on usability and tooling for the vast majority of users.
Thank you for your work!
I am looking forward to your next projects.
Fons, your Pluto.jl community calls were my first introduction to open source collaboration. The welcoming and accessible environment you all fostered helped me overcome my own apprehensions. Thank you for just being you.
Hi @fonsp just saw this and want to thank you for your endless work on Pluto! We are proud in having a short journey with you in the past on using Pluto for neutral atom array controls beyond education, and that has been a very fun project!
I hope you take a well-deserved rest and enjoy whatever journey next! And hopefully see you on conferences around the world!
Dear Fons,
When I read your post, the first thing that came to my mind was the last scene of the movie āLawrence of Arabiaā (yes, I am old enough to remember such movies). In that scene, the crucial moment is when Lawrence is informed that he has been discharged and sent back to the UK. In disbelief and sadness, he turns his back on Prince Faisal and General Allenby and walks to the door, speechless. Before Lawrence disappears behind the curtains, a solemn Faisal says, āWhat I owe you is beyond evaluation.ā Your journey to make the Julia language more accessible, better known, and more widely used resembles that of T.E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt.
I remember Plutoās first version very well. It came out in March 2020, right in the same month we all sought refuge in our homes from a nasty virus intruder, and during the monumental nightmare of having to conduct assessments for a large number of students in an apocalyptic scenario. That summer, we decided that such a hopeless situation could and should be changed, as we had technologies that allowed us to overcome it: Julia and a fresh, reactive notebook called Pluto, which looked amazingly beautiful and efficient. We have used them for six years now, with around 450 students every academic year. We love both, and the students love Pluto. It is a terrible pity that the Julia community will see Fons leave, as Lawrence did in the movie.
On another side note, I find some of the comments that have been directed towards the initial decision to keep reactivity as a fundamental characteristic of Pluto, sometimes mildly, sometimes more arrogantly, stupid. I have also used marimo (the reactive notebook in Python, developed based on the original work of Fons and colleagues), participated in the forums associated with Python and marimo, and have never seen any similar reaction in those places!! By looking at those comments, we get the feeling that the people who produce them do not fully understand what a reactive notebook does and stands for, and they just want a new tool to do what they are used to. Well, there are plenty of tools for that; they do not need a reactive notebook at all.
I wish you all the best. You go, but be certain that your contribution to the Julia language will be incomparably greater than the retribution you received from our community. I am sorry I was not able to be more helpful or more forthcoming about the brilliant piece of software you and your colleagues have developed, but as a mediocre and humble programmer, I felt there was very little I could help with. I hope your departure will not force some Julia users to seek refuge elsewhere. If you decide to come to Lisbon sometime, drop me a note; it will be a pleasure to offer you dinner.
As a former Pluto.jl user I want to thank you for all the effort and dedication you put into this package. I understand your vision about making things accessible to make the language something that can be adopted by anyone, anywhere and anytime. I took a lot of inspiration from your package in my work for this language, focusing always on the end-user experience (which is what we should point on). You are correct on the idea of Julia developers focusing in solutions that are mostly related to performance. This is something we need to solve if we want to make this beloved technology a better starting and longtime place.
I wish you the best in everything.
Hi Fons, that is somewhat sad to hear, but perfectly understandable. Pluto is a great tool and will undoubtedly be around for years to come, as an awesome way to use Julia. And thanks for the presentation you gave on Pluto a long time ago for SURF/NLeSC.
Het allerbeste!
Hi Fons,
Thanks for making such an amazing package! In the years, we have created hundreds of Pluto notebooks for both teaching and research. I always felt the style, colour, humour, and reactivity showcased the best of Julia.
I wish you the very best in anything you try. Please drop a mail whenever you are in the neighbourhood of Ghent!
M
Many thanks Fons for all the voluntary work! You did an a-ma-zing job to improve the tooling of the Julia ecosystem. And the bar was high since, gotta say, Jupyter notebook was already a great tool. But the reactivity and the user-friendliness makes the experience a 100% better. You should be f*****g proud! 
I also share this view that we should focus more on accessibility and simplicity before anything else. I did not used Pluto.jl a lot, because I prefer a good old script with a main function, but when I did it it just worked. And thatās whatās great toolinā does: just work.
Itās just sad to see one of the best contributor leave because of something that looks like a FOSS burnout. But thatās clearly the best decision you could take right now for you. 
I wish you the best for your next professional challenges 
Hi Fons!, Thank you and good luck in your endeavors! Iāve been using Pluto at least since 2021 - I had been using Jupyter but Pluto really clicked for me from the beginning. Iām an engineer first (and the old-fashioned hardware kind, not a software engineer) and having something that let me use the fun parts of Julia without having to worry much about the not-so-fun parts is a really big deal. I hope you are proud of what you accomplished and shared - at the very least I think you should be! Iām sad that you have to leave but you have to take care of yourself. Take that well-deserved break and then go learn something new!
Fons, thank you for your high-quality (in both taste and function) work on the Pluto notebook! I use Pluto.jl for my research and in my engineering courses at Oregon State University (~100 students each year). your work has definitely made a positive impact on my ~daily coding. itās a joy to code in Pluto and feel safe thanks to the reactivity. thank you for training the next maintainers, and I hope that this will make Pluto live on in terms of its maintenance and (a bit of, maybe) development.
Fons, thanks for sharing your vision and so much hard work. You have been a pioneer in taking notebooks so far beyond Jupyter. I think your idea will continue to resonate, as it does in Marimo.
@fonsp, thank you for developing this amazing package. Pluto.jl was one of the most useful tools for learning Julia when I first picked it up. It also kept me employed for three years! We developed a package on aircraft design and aerospace engineering analyses (AeroFuse.jl) for use in pedagogical instruction at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Developing Pluto notebooks to deliver the lectures was central to communicating the interdisciplinary concepts effectively, especially with the reactivity component.
Thank you so very much for Pluto! Iām using it for teaching and self-contained research proof-of-concepts, itās great!
Actually, I think I last created a Jupyter notebook some three, four years ago? Nowadays for me itās Pluto for Julia and marimo for Python.
Yep, negative feedback is actually terrible. Anger and entitlement?! Towards a great piece of software that works and is actually on par with Jupyter notebooks, maybe better? Pluto is also free and the devs are willing fix issues on GitHub, quickly and again for free. If youāre frustrated with a bug, help fix it by opening an issue. Channel the frustration into building a minimum reproducible example to describe the bug!
I wish you the best.
Iām sure this was hard for you. It was hard for me. I felt like I was walking away from a (large) part of myself when I moved on from a (much smaller than Pluto) project that touched far fewer people than Pluto did.
Take what you learned and achieve even greater heights. 
Thank you for this important creation which is a core part of the Julia eco-system. Whenever I present Julia to people in terms of āhow-to-runā, it is one of the key avenues to be mentioned or demonstrated. I know Pluto is much more, but in any case, thank you!
Very sad to read this, but it absolutely understandable that you feel the need to distance yourself.
Pluto.jl blew my mind when it came out. The wow factor was huge, such a fantastic contribution! The positive energy, humour and playfullness that you brought to the Julia community will be very much missed.
Thank you so much for your amazing contributions, and best of luck for whatever you do in the future!
Hi Fons,
Reading this, I fully empathise with you. I am privileged to share your incredible passion for accessible open source, and I share your vision that Julia is the language to make it happen. Iām doing my best to propagate it within JuliaDynamics and in my lectures, and your efforts with the MIT-computational-thinking like course website will be instrumental in this! So thank you! But I totally see where youāre coming from with this postā¦ Itās almost 10 years now that Iām running JuliaDynamics but I havenāt gotten any dedicated funding, or have gotten anyone to be a regular maintainer. Iām doing my best to organise community events, but attendance is lowā¦ So I fully get this feeling of isolation. It is creeping in like nobodyās business!
I am very sorry to hear that the negativity got to you! But I applaud you for having the courage to address this! And I thank you for your honesty and openness! Needless to say your impact on the whole JuliaLang landscape will be ever lasting and I am sure that what youāve build will stay strong and will reflect your passion and identity for years to come!
All the best for your next step and see you in Mainz!
We come together though in our feelings of isolation, you can connect about that with any open source dev 
Hey Fons!
Thanks a lot for your work! I use Pluto.jl since the day I started Julia in 2021, and it has been very useful all along these years!
Good luck for whatās next!
fdekerm
@fonsp ,
Many thanks for all your work and for bringing Pluto.jl to 1.0, with the desktop version as the cherry on top!
I discovered Pluto around late 2020 and have used it mainly in education. Since then, about 100 students per year have been introduced to Julia using notebooks. This has been a transformative experience, by making thinking more visible, exposing students to applied knowledge, and boosting their critical thinking with hands-on interactive exploration.
It was also my own gateway into the Julia universe , as someone coming from Matlab. I had previously tried using Jupyter with Julia but found it unsuitable for exploring new topics because it lacked reactivity, even though I did not know that feature at the time.
I wish you the greatest success for this new chapter, and I hope you stay in the education field!.
If you ever come to Lisbon, let me know. I would be glad to host you for a tour of Cascais, the place from Nickās CSV file example in your first Pluto YouTube video!