I really like notebooks as a way to share an analysis or data visualization. For me the biggest benefits are: - Integration. So nice to have access to the compu

I really like notebooks as a way to share an analysis or data visualization. For me the biggest benefits are: - Integration. So nice to have access to the compute, data and libraries all in one place. There is a surprising amount of hassle moving data, setting up paths and libraries, etc. Notebooks almost act like for a container for data analysis rather than service. - Sharable and reproducible. My coworkers can reproduce and explore some new idea with almost no effort, especially important when their strengths are more ML or stats than devops. - Literate programming. It is really nice to have plots, markdown and code all it one place when deliverable is a report or analysis rather than code. Even with these benefits I do think the criticisms about software development are right on point. Notebooks are a step backward in terms of software engineering environment with none of the modern tooling, version control, testing frameworks etc. I think that the folks who dismiss notebooks as a platform though are missing some important benefits that have long been absent in current editors. Larger companies like Facebook and Google are already facing the reality that devops is a pain point even for sophisticated software engineers and have developed remote code editors like cider and nucleotide to try and enable bringing code development to the data and compute rather than doing it from the laptop. R has been working on a long time on integrating analysis results and code in a reproducible package with sweave/knitr and python now has pweave in a similar fashion. I hear all the issues with jupyter and I'm not particularly married to current form of notebooks. I do think though that the features of remote development, data visualization and support for literate/report programming and sharing ode are first class features that I'll continue to want in the future.