No, it's a fair question. To be honest, if you're not doing exploration or quick prototyping work (you don't have to be a data scientist though), Jupyter might

No, it's a fair question. To be honest, if you're not doing exploration or quick prototyping work (you don't have to be a data scientist though), Jupyter might not be that useful to you. Jupyter is really useful when you have intermediate results that you don't want to keep regenerating. It lets you test different ideas at any given point in the program without re-running everything above it -- kind of like a pause button. (garden of forking paths) And if you do have to change any code, you can change things in-situ without re-running the entire program. It's like programming with a tape-recorder with mutable state.... hmm, ok maybe that isn't a good analogy, but close enough. For quick scripts, I reach for vim and run my code on the console, and insert "import ipdb;ipdb.set_trace()" wherever I need breakpoints. For more complex work where there are different permutations, and many throwaway branches of ideas that I have to test, Jupyter (or any notebook type tool) is way more useful.