I used Mathematica’s notebook interface quite heavily 15-20 years ago; Jupyter’s interface is a clone of that in many ways.
At the time, my workflow was to use two different notebooks for everything: foo.nb and foo-scratch.nb. I’d get things working a piece at a time in foo-scratch.nb, not caring at all how it looked, not having to worry about leaving extra output or dead ends of explorations lying around; then the refined cells would be copied over to foo.nb, which would get pristine presentation, and which I could run top-to-bottom.
This workflow worked pretty well for me: very clean reproducible output, with the ability to easily refer back to all the steps of how I’d derived something, along with copious detailed private notes.
I never had to use it but I’m pretty sure each cell even had its modification time stored in the metadata in case I wanted to view a chronological history.
At the time, my workflow was to use two different notebooks for everything: foo.nb and foo-scratch.nb. I’d get things working a piece at a time in foo-scratch.nb, not caring at all how it looked, not having to worry about leaving extra output or dead ends of explorations lying around; then the refined cells would be copied over to foo.nb, which would get pristine presentation, and which I could run top-to-bottom.
This workflow worked pretty well for me: very clean reproducible output, with the ability to easily refer back to all the steps of how I’d derived something, along with copious detailed private notes.
I never had to use it but I’m pretty sure each cell even had its modification time stored in the metadata in case I wanted to view a chronological history.