Others have mentioned the usefulness of literate programming so I won't reiterate that. Partially the lack of discipline comes from the implicit data dependanc

Others have mentioned the usefulness of literate programming so I won't reiterate that. Partially the lack of discipline comes from the implicit data dependancies between cells. Variables are all globally scoped and unless you ensure the notebook can be ran top to bottom its easy to introduce subtle bugs. I believe Julia's https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl solves this issue quite well. Another part comes from cells that should really be functions. In my opinion this is because functions are 2nd class citizens compared to cells, and could be improved with UI (function cells? node based programming?). Programming is more than just manipulating text, so why shouldn't tools move in a direction of just being fancy text editors?