I think now we have a lot of things like this-- we have Jupyter, Matlab, etc, to create engineer-centric general purpose interactive documents. We have labor-heavy ways to make end-user focused ones in the browser. We have spreadsheets.
But-- wouldn't it be cool if there was a way ordinary people could create interactive content to interact with data in a rich, intuitive way?
Because it's not installed, and they don't want to and shouldn't have to learn something new when there's something not new already at hand which suffices.
If you ever find yourself saying something like, "people can just do X" and wondering why they don't, turn it around and ask yourself, "why can't I just do Y?" In this case, that would be, "Why can't I just make my notebooks work in the viewers that everyone already has agreed upon using (i.e. the WHATWG/W3C hypertext system, i.e. the web browser) instead of asking them to futz around with installing and learning Jupyter?". When you start making excuses for why not, it's the moment you should be able understand another person's reasons for why not Jupyter.
My feelings about this aspect of Jupyter are two-fold:
1. On the creation side, it requires someone be comfortable with Python (or other Jupyter language) to some degree. Right now, programming is still considered a career skill rather than something "ordinary people" should be expected to know. Perhaps layering a graphical programming interface on top of this, which UE4 seems to have had some success with with their Blueprint system, would get "ordinary people" over the mental hurdle of being intimidated by code-as-text. Just look at the mental gymnastics people will engage with in Excel while thinking it's not programming.
I see this as more of a social problem than a technical one, at any rate.
2. Once you build an interactive Jupyter document (especially if you use interactive widgets), it's not necessarily that easy to share in its original state without requiring the reader also have a Jupyter environment set up or access a server running Jupyter. I would like to be able to share the document in a way that can be accessed offline by someone without them needing to set up the whole environment. Maybe an "Adobe Reader"-like application for Jupyter notebooks that "ordinary people" can just install with a click?
re #1: I think it's a technical problem too. I'm technically competent and enjoy programming, but I'd still like it if sometimes I could ask questions and get answers with less or no code. BI platforms are a pain in the ass for many reasons, but they often make it very easy to ask simple questions and organize the data in simple ways. A document that could do similar things without all the scaffolding would be cool.
#2-- Or just use the browser. It's capable enough, even if large datasets are somewhat problematic. The hard thing is the UI and identifying what the correct subset of functionality to surface is.
