I fundamentally agree with you but I have the feeling that some some of the major proponents of notebooks belong to the category of people who misunderstand the

I fundamentally agree with you but I have the feeling that some some of the major proponents of notebooks belong to the category of people who misunderstand them, and simply use them for everything, and write long and convoluted notebooks; I’ve definitely seen my share of those in my domain (bioinformatics, AI) and elsewhere. By contrast, Joel Grus for instance perfectly understands their strengths and weaknesses. As for being a a good REPL, I feel that an actual REPL (+ editor integration) works better than notebooks: You can combine a literate document with a REPL but still get the benefits of a proper editor/IDE and a proper execution environment, rather than a half-hearted mix of both that’s hosted inside a HTML contenteditable (= Jupyter), and you also get “charts, interactivity, nice and wide sortable tables, etc” if you want). RMarkdown inside RStudio or Nvim-R does this well. — I just don’t want to give up the advantages of a proper editor for the very slight increase in integration that Jupyter gives me.