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by ray__ 1109 days ago
I was always under the impression that Donald Knuth “invented” notebooks in 1984¹. Maybe Mathematica was the first to implement it, but that’s not the impression you get from the article.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

1 comments

AFAICT, literate programming does not imply interactive workflow. Also, Mathematica notebooks are extremely flexible thanks to its lisp-like language, and it's not really about writing docs and code. You can draw diagrams, format texts and paragraphs, and embed dynamic/interactive elements. It's indeed the first and the foremost in its direction.