Have you had a look at org-mode babel? It's extremely interesting how they have managed to create an all plain text environment that is in some ways[0] better

Have you had a look at org-mode babel? It's extremely interesting how they have managed to create an all plain text environment that is in some ways[0] better than the current notebooks. Of course it's not as user friendly and needs quite a bit of polish, and a major refactor to separate the above use case from the tangle use case. The tangle part of org is even more interesting as it's probably the first fully literate system that allows you to completely document everything about a software project. And since it's language agnostic I do mean everything from install, compile, connect to the external databases, export the documentation in every format under the sun and whatever else you can think of (including docx through pandoc). I'm going through the source code slowly to get it streamlined, but the code is suffering from the typical lisp syndrome of "Everything is implemented everywhere." [0] Being able to run multiple languages on the same org file, controlling environments for scripting languages, compiling on page for non-scripting languages.