My son demonstrated Mathematica to me a while back. Is there anything similar which works within the workbook metaphor, but which is not limited to Mathematica?
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What is it that you find not customisable in M- ? What exactly do you mean by a Notebook limited to M-.? – Dec 14 '11 at 10:20
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2Are you looking for mathematical capabilities or just the capability to gather stuff in a scrapbook? – Sjoerd C. de Vries Dec 14 '11 at 10:33
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@Sjoerd C. de Vries: A scrapbook which has a mechanism for different programming languages and outputs – bugmagnet Dec 15 '11 at 02:08
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I ticked Seco .. but had second thoughts. – bugmagnet Dec 15 '11 at 02:29
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Seco (formerly Scriba) supports many languages in Mathematica-inspired notebook style.
Note that, with a bit of programming, Mathematica notebooks are not limited to the Mathematica language.
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I assume you are asking what other programming languages/systems support notebooks, as opposed to the traditional linear command line (and all its improved variants). I think the notebook paradigm is an exceptionally great way to work interactively, and it is unfortunate that so few has recognized its utility (it is catching on, but not nearly as fast as it should in my opinion)
Most computer algebra systems seem to have some kind of notebook interface (Maple, MuPad, Sage do)
Recent versions of MATLAB have a cell mode, which is not exactly a notebook, but it embraces a similar philosphy and allows a similar workflow.
As Python is often used for scientific work, there are several Python editors that either try to implement a notebook interface (e.g. Reinteract) or copy MATLAB's cell mode (e.g. iep), none really well maintained. A very promising but not yet released project is IPython 0.12's HTML notebook.
Szabolcs
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Another +1 for [IPython](http://ipython.org/), the new Qt console (as well as the HTML notebook) in version 0.12 looks really good. I enjoyed the talks about it at [SciPy 2011](http://conference.scipy.org/scipy2011/talks.php) – Simon Dec 14 '11 at 22:22
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Taking the opposite tack to Szabolcs, if by “not limited to Mathematica” you mean “can use other programming languages in the same interface”, it is worth bearing in mind that Mathematica already has hooks into other languages, including Java, C, .Net, and the command line (using the Run command).
In principle you could develop code in the notebook interface and just save the relevant bits as text files using the “Save Selection As...” command. Seems a bit roundabout, but it is doable.
Verbeia
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Also sharing Verbeia's interpretation, you can theoretically use the Notebook interface for other languages by using the CellEvaluationFunction setting. You could use a new cell style to intermix this with Mathematica commands.
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It works very well [with MATLAB](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8326258/install-mathlink-program-with-arbitrary-path-environment). – Szabolcs Dec 14 '11 at 13:13
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vim-notebook - a (unix-only) plugin for the Vim editor for handling any interpreter in a Notebook style.
DBtree implements similar style of interacting with an SQL database.
wxMaxima is a similar style graphical front-end for the computer algebra system Maxima.
Juno - an IDE for the Julia programming language.
IJulia Notebook is based on IPython.
esProc and RStudio are also somewhat similar as they are holding the result of command evaluation in a viewable form.
I would also mentioned the Factor's console (because of its Inspector) and Insight Maker.
Roman Mishin
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Perhaps one of the most unusual and I think related additions to this category of tools (that did not come to mind right away because it is not a programming tool by itself) is Aibase - a Creative Data Manager. It realizes the concept of Aimos - script-containers written in Python 3 - that can implement actions and calculations.
Roman Mishin
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