Thanks.

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

This looks really interesting, thanks. The communication is great, often I want to munge the data / collect things in python, then graph them in R.

To respond more directly to your question:

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.