Comment by julienchastang

I work with scientists that love the IPython Notebook technology. Some claim the IP[y]: Notebook to be the best thing since the Mosaic web browser and the most important development in scientific computing in a decade. They are replacing a variety of tools (Perl, Matlab, R, etc.) with the notebook technology. I tend to agree, it is a revolutionary technology and the idea of executable papers is tantalizing. But I also see some limitations. Setting up a Python environment with all the necessary libraries can be a real pain in the neck even with technologies like pip. Also taking advantage of multicore parallelism is not trivial because of the Python Global Interpreter Lock. I have also worked in JVM environments where parallel computing is becoming significantly easier and I don't see that happening in Python anytime soon. I would love to be proven wrong, of course.