People dismiss modern notebooks as Knuth's style of literate programming, where they are more for exploring and documenting an existing codebase or just experimenting. So people are often arguing over two completely different things.
I love notebooks, made VS Code extensions for Go (gobook) and for Rust (rustnote). Give them a try if anyone is interested, still lots of features to add, but the source code is standard markdown, so the code results can be saved straight to Github and they render there.
It's plenty loved, I'd say the most loved, but still a fair way behind Oracle in terms of popularity just because of legacy stuff. Damn legacy code, hecking JQuery was still the most used JS framework until just this year!
I like what Chris Lattner said about language design in Lex Fridman podcast, that you know when you're doing something right because it "feels" right. Rust has a bunch of syntactic sugar which gets critised in many languages, but to me things like error returns with ? "feels" right. Love Go as well, and the error handling makes a lot of sense in concept but it just doesn't "feel" nice to look at or use.
I like there's a language that has such a strong vision, but dealing in absolutes has drawbacks, a little sytactic sugar would make error handling a lot nicer.
I just got it to a usable state today, does what you're asking which is run rust code without a main function. Just open a .md file and you're good to go. Also saves the outputs to markdown so you can upload to blog sites. I've only tried it on Linux btw might not work on other platforms.
People love writing Rust, if they want to try rewriting stuff why not? Might end up better might end up worse, can't hurt. I doubt it's out of spite for other languages, think it's just out of personal passion and curiosity.
Coal isn't just for electricity, it usually rises and falls with the price of steel because it's needed for the process. Also has use in a bunch of other things like water filters.
Error handling is one area I way prefer in Rust. It's trivial but having a single line "expect" to throw on some additional text to an error if it doesn't need anything else is really nice. In Go even something really simple might have a bunch of three line error checks everywhere and it just doesn't feel nice to me.
I love notebooks, made VS Code extensions for Go (gobook) and for Rust (rustnote). Give them a try if anyone is interested, still lots of features to add, but the source code is standard markdown, so the code results can be saved straight to Github and they render there.