It might be useful to those not familiar with it, but this blogpost was written using IPython Notebooks - you can code, plot and then render to HTML all in the browser. Most of my data science work is done using this format. If Python isn't your language of choice, there are lots of plugins for Python Notebook to let you effectively do in-browser REPL with plotting and documentation: http://ipython.org/notebook.html
First time stumbling across Beaker Notebook. Looks great! Recently heard about Jupyter[1][2], which is a project to generalize the IPython backend to be language agnostic. Are the various Two Sigma financial services entities using Beaker internally? Seems like a natural fit for the highly mathematical nature of the work Two Sigma staff and entities are engaged in.
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.
Jupyter is coming BUT I have zero idea why the community around iPython still doesn't know that iPython will only equal the Python back end and Jupyter will be the over all project.
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????
Jupyter definitely hasn't lost interest - the IPython team is currently spending a lot of time finishing up IPython 3.0 and seeking funding (grants, etc.). IPython 3.0 is due to be released soon now (3.0 beta 1 was tagged a few days ago, and the development is somewhat in a soft freeze in preparation for 3.0). The general plan is to split up the IPython repo and transition to a Jupyter repo after 3.0 is released, and have a relatively quick iteration to 4.0 (mainly consisting of the repo split).
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
PS: we have a prerelease of v1.2 available, including a docker container. see the last question at the bottom of the page on our FAQ for the download links: http://beakernotebook.com/faq
MathCAD is still around, it is at least pretty popular in my field (nuclear engineering). I actually hate it to be honest, but I think it is good for people who are less inclined towards programming.
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).
It's great for some things, but bad for others. If you're using Firefox for example, and the notebook is calculating something, it will lock up all Firefox windows. Also, if you are printing a lot, the html rendering is very slow and consumes a lot of CPU.
Great for previewing graphs and copy pasting and executing things out of order.
The first part regarding Firefox is not true. Calculation is completely asynchronous in the IPython notebooks, i.e. if you run a cell that doesn't output anything your browser is idling.
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.
It's changed the way I work (and blog)