Actually notebooks can be converted to LaTeX.
Notebooks (or the REPL) are for interactive work. For large (PhD-level) programming projects I think you typically want to put together proper Julia modules and use general-purpose editors (though JupyterLab is an option) on your own computer. But that’s very different from classroom usage … if someone is setting out to do PhD-level numerical work, learning how to install software should not be the biggest hurdle.
Of course!
Yessir, I am not a young man.
My workflow is having Julia/Matlab open in a terminal window + several other windows running vi. I don’t even use the matlab desktop for anything but profiling. My students do most of their work in notebooks and see me as a relic.
The issue with publishing notebooks, which is one reason I got interested in Julia, is not that you can’t get LaTeX. It’s the postprocessing you have to do to meeting the rules for journals, book publishers, and universities. I know people who are close to figuring this out for SIAM books and python and I’m hoping to do something like that with Julia in a few years. I’ve been told by someone who’s put major effort into this that it can be a lot of work, but the tools are coming online pretty rapidly.
I’ve been more or less sold on notebooks for reproducability. I got spooked when PyPlot stopped working, but I’m planning on a notebook for my next paper.
You can always export the plain vanilla source code from the notebook (as a .jl file). Everything you can do at the REPL, you can do in a notebook (except stuff that relies on terminal interaction).
Using a notebook, or an editor + REPL is a matter of preference, they are mostly functionally equivalent. I am not trying to talk you into using a notebook — I use Emacs myself, simply because I find that the editing capabilities of notebook interfaces just don’t compare (as a vi user, I think you may feel the same). But it is a perfectly fine choice for some people.
FYI, both Jupyter Notebook and Jupyter Lab come with an in-browser terminal app which can be used for simple things. You can use Vim in it (well, kind of…) although it’s not super smooth. Jupyter Lab also has REPL which can be used without notebook file attached to it (if you know qtconsole it’s very similar).