[ericjang]

What would be really amazing is if Jupyter's notebook server was abstracted further from a general cell-based execution model, and instead provided a generic graphics backend for making web-based GUIs for a variety of programming languages.

Sort of like a combination of GFX.js: https://github.com/clementfarabet/gfx.js/ and PyWidgets, except widgets are no longer constrained to a single cell and the interface is not limited to cells.

This would make it really easy to prototype IDEs and other programming tools in the browser or on native clients - in general it's pretty hard to write an IDE or graphical tool because one needs to integrate system calls to whatever graphics frontend they are writing. However, Jupyter's kernel architecture gives that away for free.