Agreed. The problem with reproducing Jupyter runbooks in academia is that someone thought a Jupyter runbook is a way to convey information from one person to another. Those are an awful model for that.
As an on-the-fly debugging tool, they're great: you get a REPL that isn't actively painful to use, a history (roughly, since the state is live and every cell is not run every time) of commands run, and visualization at key points in the program to check as you go your assumptions are sound.
As an on-the-fly debugging tool, they're great: you get a REPL that isn't actively painful to use, a history (roughly, since the state is live and every cell is not run every time) of commands run, and visualization at key points in the program to check as you go your assumptions are sound.