[alexisread]

I think this is the crux of the issue, use like this is like a real program, just built up incrementally in a notebook rather than a repl or shell-with-pipes, and with manual error handling. The STEPS project was all about this- a way of incrementally building blocks that can be composed.

With org mode in mind, ideally you would have language support for this ie. Comments are scoped metadata that can be formatted, tested, linked etc.

You need a well defined spec like djot as a DSL for this to work, so that parsers can be easily written for it. This level of language support allows many different views onto the source code. We’re not there yet.