Beaker Notebook provides a different model for working in Python and R. Instead ...

baldfat · on Jan 7, 2016

Jupyter Notebooks (Formerly IPython Notebooks) http://jupyter.org/ is kernel agnostic and can work with all the other languages also. I use it for R and Python myself. (For data work I still prefer RStudio or Python's Rodeo)

Breaker uses the same jkernel as IPython and backend of Jupyter.

spot · on Jan 7, 2016

that's right, but Jupyter notebooks have just one language each, they don't facilitate polyglot programming.

captaindiego · on Jan 8, 2016

Their are some "cell magics" for running different languages in individual blocks in a Jupyter notebook. I gave it a try in passing with javascript a while back and I remember there was a way to share variables through as well.

You can see the available magics here: https://ipython.org/ipython-doc/3/interactive/magics.html#ce...

Unfortunately it looks like there is none for R or Julia, but perhaps they are installed by those specific packages, or their is some other way I don't know of.

IndianAstronaut · on Jan 8, 2016

Cell magics are exactly what I was looking for. Much easier to do some data cleanup stuff in Python and move stats heavy stuff to R.

baldfat · on Jan 8, 2016

RMagic for R and Python in Jupyter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StX_F_kq_C0

IndianAstronaut · on Jan 9, 2016

Good video. One thing I am looking to do is call Python from an R notebook, but that doesn't seem to be happening with the magic functions.

tianlins · on Jan 8, 2016

Jupyter notebooks do support multiple languages. However, sharing objects among the languages is a whole another thing.

IndianAstronaut · on Jan 8, 2016

The sharing objects thing seems like it would be fraught with errors and mismatches. R has a fundamentally different structuring than Python. From factors to numerics, and vectors.

spot · on Jan 8, 2016

R's "everything is a vector" approach does introduce a wrinkle but not hard to work with once you expect it: https://pub.beakernotebook.com/#/publications/560b5722-f287-...

If you can find an error in our implementation I would be happy to hear about it (ideally file an issue on github).

I am not an expert in R and I don't expect autotranslation to cover every case, but I think what we have is useful, and I look forward to continuing to improve it based on community feedback.

Thanks, -Scott

IndianAstronaut · on Jan 9, 2016

I'll give this another look. Was hoping for somethings in the Jupyter notebook that didn't materialize.

codemac · on Jan 7, 2016

Org-Mode has a similar layout for it's org-babel stuff in emacs. So glad to see something similar that's outside of the emacs ecosystem, would love to get an org-mode exporter / importer for beaker notebooks so I can collaborate with coworkers on higher order transformations.

nipun_batra · on Jan 7, 2016

Very interesting! Thanks for the comment! I do see the advantages of beaker. I also see the advantages other way around :)