Martin Fowler

First, let’s describe what computational notebooks are. Notebooks originated with the Wolfram Mathematica language and the idea is now quite popular in the data science community, particularly with Python and R users. Basically, it’s a combination of a script consisting of commands integrated with some visualization and documentation. You see the code that has been run and the result, whether it is just text, a nicely formatted table or a graphical figure. The documentation can explain what is happening, making them useful for tutorials. Notebooks are essentially a nicer interactive shell, where commands can be stored and easily rerun with changes. The graphics or outputs are right there in one window rather than saved elsewhere in files or popped up in other windows. The interactive session can be saved in one file and shared so that anyone else (under certain conditions) can run it with the same results.

Notebooks are

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