Notebook interface

A notebook interface (also called a computational notebook or data science notebook) is a virtual notebook environment used for literate programming. It pairs the functionality of word processing software with both the shell and kernel of that notebook's programming language. Examples of the notebook interface include the Mathematica notebook, Maple worksheet, MATLAB notebook, IPython/Jupyter, R Markdown, Apache Zeppelin, Apache Spark, and the Databricks cloud.

The notebook interface was first introduced in 1988 with the release of Mathematica 1.0 on the Macintosh. It was followed by Maple in 1989 when their first notebook-style graphical user interface was released with version 4.3 for the Macintosh. As the notebook interface increased in popularity over the next two decades, kernels/backends to notebooks for many languages were introduced, including MATLAB, Python, Julia, Scala, SQL, and others.

Notebooks are traditionally used in the science as electronic lab notebooks to document research procedures, data, calculations, and findings. Notebooks track methodology as to make it easier to reproduce results and calculations with different data sets.

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