Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really like Beaker. However Jupyter also caters to a wide range of languages, albeit one language per notebook. So the main differentiator for Beaker is that it can auto translate data between languages. However there is a giant catch to that: it is done by serialising the data which intrinsically means it is extremely expensive for any significant sized data set. As a result, in most cases I end up writing my data…
thanks. indeed autotranslation currently only works for small data. fixing it with shared memory and hdf5 is on the agenda for later this year: https://github.com/twosigma/beaker-notebook/wiki/Roadmap I would really like to hear what usability and convenience advantages RStudio has for you...
1) the IDE like environment. Although I do a lot of work "literate document" style, there's a very fluid relationship between the one-off / throw away code that ends up in those documents and the code that ends up becoming reusable. RStudio puts the interactive environment into my hands but gives me tabs with full documents to work with so that I can take those ad hoc bits of code and seamlessly move them into reusable scripts, or even fully structured libraries and program code. Conversely, any piece of code in those scripts or libraries is trivial to throw back into my interactive console to use ad hoc as well. This fluid workflow perfectly matches my development style: starts with experiments to figure out how to do things which is very ad hoc, gradually matures and eventually ends up being a static solid thing that I want to capture as a reusable component. With Beaker and Jupyter I feel like I am always stuck in "throw away code" mode, and there's a high friction to move code between the two paradigms.
2) The plot display seems to work a lot better. With both Beaker and jupyter I find the inline plots are too static - always the wrong size or the wrong shape, etc. In RStudio I can drag and resize that window independently.
I feel bad because I'm not telling you solutions and I don't really have any - but these are the things I love about RStudio. Of course, the downside of RStudio is ... R.