[dahart]

I’m not sure what distinction you’re trying to make. Maybe you can give some examples of notebooks that are not REPLs, since some of them definitely are. For example, Wikipedia says Jupyter Notebook is a REPL. The bare Python REPL (and the command line REPLs in any language, for that matter) has the exact same issue with tracking state, because what you describe is a problem with all REPLs, and all notebooks that are REPLs. That isn’t generally a serious problem with command line REPLs, because those REPLs aren’t meant or used for large system programming, they’re for trying small experiments. The parent article is pure opinion and seems a bit confused about the idea of using the right tool for the job, because command line REPLs and notebooks both have their place, as do IDE projects with lots of files.

“A Jupyter Notebook application is a browser-based REPL containing an ordered list of input/output cells which can contain code, text (using Github Flavored Markdown), mathematics, plots and rich media.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Jupyter