This is a great article. For me, a lot relates to scale.
I use notebooks occasionally for the university classes I teach. I like how I can write equations and text to explain ideas, and present interactive graphs to illustrate the ideas.
But it's quite a lot of work to set things up, and there can be a problem when components of the work take a long time.
In my research work, it is common for a calculation or a graph to take hours to days. Doing work like that in a notebook is just a non-starter. I use scripts (in various languages) along with Makefiles that "know" if I've changed my code or my data, and only rebuilds a result file or a graph when require. Almost always, I separate code that does analysis from code that creates graphical displays. And of course the text (of a paper, course notes, etc.) is written to incorporate these numerical and graphical results. The whole point is to subdivide complex tasks into smaller tasks that can be executed in an organized way.
I don't see the sense in using one tool (notebooks, say) for simple tasks and other tools (scripts, a strong editor, tmux, unix, etc.) for complex tasks. So, apart from the toy tools that I make for some teaching tasks, I stick to simple unix-style tools for the tricky stuff.
It's important to have many tools in the toolbox. Notebooks can be useful for some things, but I wouldn't want to frame a wall using an awl.
I use notebooks occasionally for the university classes I teach. I like how I can write equations and text to explain ideas, and present interactive graphs to illustrate the ideas.
But it's quite a lot of work to set things up, and there can be a problem when components of the work take a long time.
In my research work, it is common for a calculation or a graph to take hours to days. Doing work like that in a notebook is just a non-starter. I use scripts (in various languages) along with Makefiles that "know" if I've changed my code or my data, and only rebuilds a result file or a graph when require. Almost always, I separate code that does analysis from code that creates graphical displays. And of course the text (of a paper, course notes, etc.) is written to incorporate these numerical and graphical results. The whole point is to subdivide complex tasks into smaller tasks that can be executed in an organized way.
I don't see the sense in using one tool (notebooks, say) for simple tasks and other tools (scripts, a strong editor, tmux, unix, etc.) for complex tasks. So, apart from the toy tools that I make for some teaching tasks, I stick to simple unix-style tools for the tricky stuff.
It's important to have many tools in the toolbox. Notebooks can be useful for some things, but I wouldn't want to frame a wall using an awl.