Using Kotlin Notebooks for Teaching and Prototyping

Notebook is a standard tool for data scientists and Python educators nowadays. But could it help hardcore Java server-side developers as well? Our answer is yes! 

There were a lot of attempts to bring notebooks to the JVM world (mostly from the Scala side), but they did not get a lot of adoption outside the data science community.

Kotlin scripting allows you to not only write your notebooks in Kotlin. It enables the resolution of some well-known Python notebook issues, such as reproducible environments and visualization plugin loading. because of the seamless Kotlin integration with Java libraries, it is easy to load and experiment with Java libraries and even raw classes from the notebook REPL environment.

Another problem the notebook solves is teaching JVM languages for entry-level students. For a time, forget about setting up the IDE and build environment. Just do the code first.

The link to the main notebook: https://datalore.jetbrains.com/view/notebook/elaTOP4fvamKVCTGYAMo7u

Link to the same notebook interactively (to keep track of what we'll be doing there): https://datalore.jetbrains.com/notebook/ptQDfQAcrjNxzIO0AEqovZ/otWPOX0HsLXPAop9V2CI4W/ 
The latter requires registration in DataLore (free)