@loiseaujc thank you for this excellent answer! I could spend hours discussing, but I’ll just say quickly that I think LFortran + Jupyter, lately including JupyterLite (so that it runs in the browser on a statically-hosted webiste, no installation needed) might be a great solution.
Regarding why program at all when we have AI:
I would say AI actually allowed me to reimplement from scratch many things that I had to use libraries for before. An example from just this month: PNG and GIF encoder and decoder (in Fortran!) using AI, there is no way I would have time to do that by hand, but using AI and studying the sources, it’s actually not complicated at all, and I have a much better understanding of the details than I would have otherwise. Of course, if I did it by hand, I would understand it even better, but I don’t have time for that.
But even before AI, I always liked to reimplement things from scratch, it’s the only way to understand them for me. But it’s sometimes hard to justify the time (but even before AI often in the long run it would pay off to reimplement from scratch, I have done that many times in my career). But with AI it’s actually quite easy to reimplement many things from scratch.