Think of jupyter notebooks as turbo charged Live Scripts. The document part supports proper Markdown, proper latex math, arbitrary HTML, and interactive widgets

Think of jupyter notebooks as turbo charged Live Scripts. The document part supports proper Markdown, proper latex math, arbitrary HTML, and interactive widgets. Export options are much more comprehensive as well, including export to blogs, presentations, or code modules. Code blocks can contain arbitrary source code of course (including function definitions and class definitions), but they can also contain "magics", which are special commands that act on a cell or line, for example for debugging, profiling, reading/writing files, and much, much more. This is the true magic of jupyter notebooks. There are magics for interacting with the shell, for visualizing data, for running code in other programming languages... The possibilities are endless. And of course jupyter notebooks are just text documents (JSON), so you can put them under source control, manipulate them programmatically, or view them online without having python installed.