[WorkLifeBalance]

When I first found notebooks I was amazed at their utility. The ability to quickly display algorithms and processes to a wider (potentially layman) audience is amazing.

To be able to have a scratchpad and play around with techniques while keeping a sort-of record is also amazing.

I see it like I see excel, it's a fantastic tool for data exploration and some visualisation. It's not something that should be used in any final workflow or production system.

Like excel, it can be badly mis-used but they unlock ways of working that simply weren't possible before it.

The criticisms about hidden state are fair, I think it would be better if previous step data was more explicitly wrapped in the following cells so you could choose to use the "wrapped package" of the previous data or choose to use a re-evaluating version.

I think it works best when most cells have few side-effects, even if that means repeating previous calculations.