[larrywright]

A Jupyter notebook would work in much the same way, and has the advantage of being able to mingle Markdown in with the code.

Neither is as approachable for a non-programmer as the OP, however.

[20after4]

https://observablehq.com/ is another option, similar to jupyter but perhaps more approachable for people who like JavaScript over Python.

I'm still looking for the perfect text-based solution.