Short · checked 29 September 2026
Beaker Notebook stopped being an app and became extensions for Jupyter.
Two Sigma's open-source polyglot notebook, listed in 2016, ended as a standalone app after release 1.7.1 and continued as BeakerX, a set of Jupyter extensions.
Beaker Notebook's 2016 listing made a promise data scientists will recognise: "You can set a variable in a Python cell and then read that variable in a subsequent R cell, and everything just works, magically." The open-source notebook, from New York, was built to be polyglot from the start, with built-in support for Python, R, JavaScript, Scala, Groovy, Julia, Clojure and K, joined by a feature it called autotranslation. The small preserved screenshot shows code cells beside a candlestick chart, a heatmap and scatter plots.
It did not survive as its own application. Two Sigma's repository is now titled an archive of Beaker Notebook, covering development through release 1.7.1, the last official one, and its last commit is dated 9 May 2017.
The ideas moved rather than stopped. The archive explains that the features went into extensions for Jupyter, and the BeakerX README calls BeakerX "the successor to the Beaker Notebook": kernels and widgets for plotting, tables and autotranslation inside Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab. BeakerX reached 1.0.0 on 5 July 2018, and its latest release on PyPI, version 2.4.3, is dated 24 April 2024.
The domain on the old listing, beakernotebook.com, now redirects to beakerx.com.