I like to think of it as an engineering hack pad. Use it to prototype and interate over scripts like you would with the CLI version of IPython, but with a GUI

I like to think of it as an engineering hack pad. Use it to prototype and interate over scripts like you would with the CLI version of IPython, but with a GUI instead. I had an immense amount of fun learning OpenCV with it, shunting data to my phone over Tornado, and building interfaces to various data systems (each thing I knew nothing about from the start, but could explore). It can do all the stuff Python does, but with quite a lot of cleverness built into it. I suppose it's really an IDE, but I certainly don't use it as one. It really lends itself to being a solid, robust, napkin programming interface. Alternately: it's the turn-based tactics to LightTable's realtime strategy.