It is interesting to read this after reading about Pluto, the notebook system for Julia. Pluto is exciting because - it provides nice text formatting easily v

It is interesting to read this after reading about Pluto, the notebook system for Julia. Pluto is exciting because - it provides nice text formatting easily via MarkDown and simple production of graphics - it allows you to build a data flow out of small understandable steps and, unusually, - it understands the dependency graph between cells of computation. That means can rearrange them as you see fit but they will still execute in the right order. Moreover, it makes it so everybody sees the results of executing things in the right order. This is worlds different from most notebook systems - you can embed HTML controls directly in your notebook so that you get reactive computation This meets many of the goals Kartik was talking about in his blog.