> Understanding everything about everything you work with, like an academic would try to do, is not practical for a software engineer.
> So notebooks are not for software developers.
You admit software developers are not a homogeneous group, but these are fascinating blanket statements none-the-less. "Notebook" systems originated from software developers, if you allow the origin to be Knuth's ideas of Literate Programming [1] as the forefather of Notebook languages.
It seems an interesting full circle of sorts that Knuth heavily promoted the idea of Notebooks as a superior programming environment in a time when the languages weren't particularly suited to the task (compiled languages that needed very delicate surgery to convert from human readable order to compilable code) and tools/environments that were effectively suboptimal to the task (text editors with no GUI/WYSIWYG abilities; macro-based compilers instead of live interpreters; etc). Now we finally have the tools to make that work, and at least in a few places developers are starting to make use of it (Netflix's Papermill in the linked article is an interesting example).
Admittedly, you might argue that Knuth was perhaps more on the academic side of the fence than software developers today, but Knuth very succinctly argued that all software development would perhaps be better if we stopped relegating the human/natural language narrative of the project to embedded comments in a programming language, and instead embedded the programming language into our human/natural language narratives.
> So notebooks are not for software developers.
You admit software developers are not a homogeneous group, but these are fascinating blanket statements none-the-less. "Notebook" systems originated from software developers, if you allow the origin to be Knuth's ideas of Literate Programming [1] as the forefather of Notebook languages.
It seems an interesting full circle of sorts that Knuth heavily promoted the idea of Notebooks as a superior programming environment in a time when the languages weren't particularly suited to the task (compiled languages that needed very delicate surgery to convert from human readable order to compilable code) and tools/environments that were effectively suboptimal to the task (text editors with no GUI/WYSIWYG abilities; macro-based compilers instead of live interpreters; etc). Now we finally have the tools to make that work, and at least in a few places developers are starting to make use of it (Netflix's Papermill in the linked article is an interesting example).
Admittedly, you might argue that Knuth was perhaps more on the academic side of the fence than software developers today, but Knuth very succinctly argued that all software development would perhaps be better if we stopped relegating the human/natural language narrative of the project to embedded comments in a programming language, and instead embedded the programming language into our human/natural language narratives.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming