I wish someone would make Jupyter alternative, but native, without the need to run webbrowser, css and bunch of JavaScript just for simple rendering task. Something based on Qt, GTK, or anything native and crossplatform.
A couple of years ago I would have totally agreed with this, and I had several abortive attempts to do something like that before starting Polynote. The problem is, it turns out that a notebook really needs to be able to display a bunch of really heterogeneous rich output. There's only one pre-baked way to support that, and it's HTML. So you can either embed HTML in your UI, or embed your UI in HTML. At least on the JVM (and at least for me), it turned out to be easier to do the latter than the former.
