Jupyter Notebooks are popular with data scientists. Microsoft even offers a free, hosted, “no-install” service for Python, R and F#.
However, there are some downsides to notebooks—mostly to do with software engineering best practices.
Joel Grus gave a provocative talk at JupyterCon 2018 entitled “I Don’t Like Notebooks”. Yihui Xie then followed up with a response to Grus’ talk.
Both authors make a good case and have interesting points. As ever, the truth is that notebooks are good in some situations and not so good in others.
Personally, I use both. Notebooks for smaller, exploratory, data science projects and IDEs (Visual Studio Code, PyCharm and RStudio) for everything else.
