When you clear the output of a cell, the variables lives on. Also a cell might change several variables but not print it.

It is extremely handy to have a spreadsheet like "variable explorer" handy to get an overview of what you have in memory and what your numbers look like and a feature that I miss from rStudio.

thanks, i think i get it, you like having a list of all the variables defined and their values (like in a debugger), in a panel that you can monitor while you run code. yes that sounds useful :)