Agree 100%! The best use of notebooks seems to be making demos of very simple things that demonstrate the idea of notebooks. My gripes: 1) It's claustrophobi

Agree 100%! The best use of notebooks seems to be making demos of very simple things that demonstrate the idea of notebooks. My gripes: 1) It's claustrophobic! Trying to work in notebooks always felt like trying to do a math problem with too little paper when you're used to big empty sheets. 2) Readability is weird! I want to see all the code and then see the plots, not little crazy crunched up snippets with little crazy crunched up plots that might allow interactivity. 3) I might actually want to do something that involves looking at more than one plot at a time! Seriously? This always struck me as ridiculous. I have screen real estate, I want to use it! ESPECIALLY for interactive data analysis. 4) They're not as portable as they should be! There's always some drama when you open up someone else's notebook locally. 5) They encourage people to write weird ass code! Scientists already have a tendency to be messy if they're not CS types, this just makes it worse. Alternative: vim + tmux + ipython REPL + vim/tmux slime for shipping stuff from the editor to the REPL + matplotlib in QT mode It's not as good as MATLAB but it gets close.