> Sigh. I really think that the only reason notebooks are so popular is that Python never had a popular IDE with a high-quality REPL where people can learn to w

> Sigh. I really think that the only reason notebooks are so popular is that Python never had a popular IDE with a high-quality REPL where people can learn to work interactively while writing code in plain text. I would not call Idle unpopular. But it had a limit for growing for sure. But Notebooks are mostly coming from the science-corner of python. People there used notebook-like tools and workflows for decades and some brought that over to ipython-project. I remember 15(?) Years ago when the project started focusing more and more on the cluster-aspect of their shell, they brought up many differenct tools for this. One of them was notebook-like and what become later Jupyter. It quickly became popular in certain groups for those reasons.