1. Interactive computation and plotting, run data through a pipeline.
2. Quick prototyping and testing. Once a function/class is ready, it goes into a module, together with some unit tests.
Nothing beats Jupyter for that second use case, 90% of the bugs are squashed through interaction and inspection in the notebook cells, not through unit tests.
That some folks can be productive with a tool doesn't say, necessarily, much about the tool. Some could probably make the same two claims for excel. It isn't that the tool should be banned, per se. Just that many practices that have been rather proven in software are much harder to do in this environment.
Sounds like what you like is the live coding aspect. Many of the lisp environments of yesteryear would have probably appealed to you. So would many earlier math packages such as matlab and mathematica. Both of those have had environments similar to the new "notebooks" for many years.
For the pure coding side, imagine using an environment that actually allowed live redefinition of stuff in the code you had written. Step debugging. Breakpoints. Conditional breakpoints.
I'm pretty sure this puts us in agreement. Right? :)
I think the counter is there is probably a lot of damage excel has done, as well. I'm not convinced other tools would have resulted in no bugs/problems.
1. Interactive computation and plotting, run data through a pipeline.
2. Quick prototyping and testing. Once a function/class is ready, it goes into a module, together with some unit tests.
Nothing beats Jupyter for that second use case, 90% of the bugs are squashed through interaction and inspection in the notebook cells, not through unit tests.