It's changed the way I work (and blog)
You can combine multiple languages in the same notebook, and they can communicate.
Beaker has autotranslation for communicating among languages, and you can have multiple languages in one notebook.
Four months ago someone asked for compare and contrast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8366245
Since then we have fixed a ton of bugs and fleshed out the concept. The reflection API and JS scriptability are about to be released, along with a bunch of UI polish, performance, and all kinds of fixes.
There are only 2-3 of us working for 2 years so far. The project is still young and developing, and in fact we are hiring! Especially we need a Javascript Engineer, Angular experience a plus: http://www.twosigma.com/careers/position/935.html
Yes you can get better tables with IPy if you remember to load a lib and call a function. With Beaker it just works by default.
Ditto for sharing, Beaker has one-click sharing to the web built in, with IPy you have to load an extension.
On the Mac, Beaker comes packaged as a native app that you just drag to Applications and the Dock.
Interesting tweet from one of the IPython/Jupyter devs[3] last year about Beaker. Jupyter and Beaker state similar missions, although Beaker seems to have focused more on "multiple languages within a single notebook" leveraging the IPython backend. Sounds like the two projects can both co-exist due to the slightly different emphasis influencing each project's trajectory.
This switch is happening in iPython 3.0 and still the lack of public information is concerning for me. It feels that Jupyter has loss steam????
That said, I think Mathematica does a much better job of notebook style programming. You can do some truly amazing things manipulating the Mathematica notebook. The language itself is also pretty nice, something like APL flavored lisp with M-expressions instead of S-expressions. It isn't without its flaws, but it is one of my favorite tools in the toolbox (along with Python, C++, Haskell and Fortran).
Great for previewing graphs and copy pasting and executing things out of order.
Even if it has one pretty large output it works quite well. However, if you `print` each intermediate result and have a few hundred of those you get a problem indeed, there is a need for some kind of overflow protection here.