[spiralk]

I've looked into Jupytext, but ultimately decided to go with pure python. Most of the practical functionality can be replicated, but I do admit there isn't a easy single install tool or guide to replace notebooks at the moment.

I think the notebooks are a fine learning tool to introduce people to programming initially, but I'm afraid it doesn't allow for growth beyond a certain level. You have a good point about funding for those software roles. Perhaps this may not be as big of a concern if there were more software talent in these labs to handle the issues that arise.

[KolenCh]

In an ideal world that we control everything and/or don’t need to collaborate with others, then whatever tooling one use is actually not that important (and each can choose the best fitting their needs.) So Jupyter+Jupytext is useful in the context of collaboration, where you can’t control your collaborators but want something from them.

While in an ideal world scientists who write softwares should write professionally, the same goes for anything they do, including math and stats used in their research, writing and typesetting and generates publishing quality visualization… That rarely happens because of how the academic world is financed, and the incentives associated with it. I can certainly complain about that all days, but in short a researcher hired by a research university, especially with a tenured track position in the US, will not be successful to get such position, let alone getting tenured, if they had not focused their scarce resource of time to maximize their “research output” (publications, grant, etc.), where software engineering is not part of. (Sorry, sentence too complicated.)