[andrew_n]

I used Mathematica’s notebook interface quite heavily 15-20 years ago; Jupyter’s interface is a clone of that in many ways.

At the time, my workflow was to use two different notebooks for everything: foo.nb and foo-scratch.nb. I’d get things working a piece at a time in foo-scratch.nb, not caring at all how it looked, not having to worry about leaving extra output or dead ends of explorations lying around; then the refined cells would be copied over to foo.nb, which would get pristine presentation, and which I could run top-to-bottom.

This workflow worked pretty well for me: very clean reproducible output, with the ability to easily refer back to all the steps of how I’d derived something, along with copious detailed private notes.

I never had to use it but I’m pretty sure each cell even had its modification time stored in the metadata in case I wanted to view a chronological history.

[zneveu]

I make a "scratch pad" section of my notebook and work on ideas there. Then once I've pieced together a function line by line and tested it a bit I move it up to where it should be in the chronological order of the notebook. Kind of like your two notebook system but makes copying easier in Jupyter.

[EForEndeavour]

I do the same, though it feels dangerous because both the good-copy and scratch sections share the same kernel. JupyterLab works on .ipynb files, and makes it way easier to copy (or drag and drop) cells between different notebooks. One of these days, I plan to switch to JupyterLab to get a sense of what else it offers above Jupyter Notebook.