What this story and many of the comments herein miss is that org-mode coupled with org-babel is a full-fledged multilanguage literate programming environment. When you have access to the shell, Python (w/ matplotlib for graphs), Clojure, R, etc. right in your org buffer, and can interact between them (and even pass data between cells of different languages), you really do have what Ken Iverson (inventor of APL, Turing award winner) called a “Tool for thought”. This prose first style of programming where text is punctuated by code (instead of the other way around) is excellent for your own thought process, exposition (via Latex, MD, HTML, text export) as well as taking notes. The only downside to org is that it is intimately tied to emacs, so if you don’t like emacs (lisp) you won’t want to use org. And one more thing, the hierarchical folding in org is second to none. That should be a simple matter, but no other environment/editor handles that feature like org.
I agree, Babel is often overlooked subset of orgmode's features. The linked article that's spawning these comments doesn't do an especially good job of explaining why a developer would should want to use orgmode. Common problem, though, orgmode is far more than an outliner tool, a lot of what it does is truly mindblowing.
Orgmode has so many features, and there are so many ways to combine them, that it's really hard to get a grasp on everything it can do. It is certainly not just an outlining tool restricted to working with strict hierarchies. E.g., searches can be done within a file -- or throughout hundreds of files -- which will then assemble all responsive headings (i.e., all connected items) in the Agenda buffer (which is, in a sense, virtual, since it doesn't represent any file or document at all; it temporarily collects items from different files). Many org-mode users "live" in their Agenda buffer. The Agenda buffer isn't technically "graphical", but in many ways it's better and more powerful than a graphical solution because the relevant, connected items all then appear as items in a single buffer, no need to follow lines on a picture connecting sometimes far-away items in a complex, confusing graphical representation.
There's so much more it's hard to know even where to begin. For programmers, learning more about org-babel is definitely a good place to start.
I've been using org-mode in various capacities for a little over a year now. I've tried other tools but keep coming back. As far as complexity goes, I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface. I like what Neal Stephenson has to say about emacs (which applies just as much to org-mode):
In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist emacs.
I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer – i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed – emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. [1]
A few things for newbies that might help:
1. A lot of org-mode 'power users' post their workflows and all of the attendant emacs lisp code [2] [3], and many new users feel like they have to customize their org-mode experience to that level to get any use out of it. DO NOT DO THIS! Start completely fresh with a clean install, just use it as a braindump outliner, and SLOWLY start adding new features as you go, based specifically on what you need for your individual workflow (the most useful first thing to learn for most people, after basic outline creation and folding, is probably the agenda view). This way you 'grow' the program to fit your own needs organically, rather than trying to shoehorn yourself into someone else's idea of a perfect workflow.
2. One customization thing I will say you should do immediately is to change the theme to match your preferred UI style. It will make a huge difference in how you 'feel' while you're using it. I love emacs but I hate, hate, hate the default UI look-and-feel. I will plug leuven-theme [4] as my current go-to for org-mode, but also dig the sanityinc tomorrow themes [5].
I will also throw in a compliment to the awesome community around emacs. It's happened to me many times where I've encountered some shortcoming or 'missing' feature of my existing setup, thought to myself "if only I could do X and Y," and discovered after 5 minutes of Googling that someone has already written something that does exactly what I'm looking for...
Very true about folding, and org-babel is amazingly capable. It is great for things like examples, notes, short tutorials, etc.
But, I have never been able to actually make use of the features in any kind of a more complicated setting: I find that too often you really need to have the code in standalone files, for example for batch jobs, running in other environments, sharing, etc. etc., and having code within the .org file really does not mix well with that. Perhaps your workflow somehow resolves that problem?
Similar, but in a lot ways org is more powerful than Jupyter Notebooks which I am also a big fan of, BTW. It is more powerful because of the exporting facilities, tangling, and you have all of emacs at your fingertips. I actually would like to develop an org exporter to ipynb format.
