When your powers combine

I’m dealing with an internal struggle right now. There are at least 3 Jupyter kernels for node.

• IJavaScript
• Jupyter-nodejs
• Jove

For IJavaScript, Nicolas Riesco extracted the messaging protocol to a separate package (https://github.com/n-riesco/jmp) so it could be used by other node applications (Electron and Atom apps e.g.). My current preference is IJavaScript because I’ve been using it, liked the layout, the documentation, the installation process, etc.

The juptyer-nodejs package has wonderful magics and I know you (@jaredly) as an active member of the community.

I’m torn because I’d like to refer to one kernel for Node, especially if any of them were to go up on https://try.jupyter.org.

Where do you think the differences are? What would help foster a common set of packages amongst developers?

/cc @n-riesco

[jaredly]

First impressions of IJavascript

What does IJavascript have that jupyter-node doesn’t have?

• incredible documentation
• shift-tab completion
• wait-for-async behavior
• messaging protocol in a separate module (great idea btw)

What does jupyter-node have the ijavascript doesn’t have?

• %%coffeescript, %%babel, %%clojurescript magics (setup extensibly)
• !echo "shell commandable" arbitrary shell commands (mimicking ipython), and cd somedir to change directory (I not positive ijavascript doesn’t have this, but it appears so)
• tests

The only other difference I see is IJavascript’s use of $$magic$$ variables. jupyter-node on the other hand uses a display() function (modeled after ipython’s display() function) that can be invoked two ways:

• display(something), and it will be automatically determined how to show it (this is not yet very clever)
• display(something, mimetype or "stderr/out") for example display(pngdata, 'image/png')

I find this more flexible than the global magic variable route, for a couple of reasons:

• display() can be called anywhere, and multiple times. $$png$$ can only be set once per execution block
• display() allows for the addition of further mime-types without having to remember more global variable names
• display() can also stream data, e.g. display("error", "stderr")

[okdistribute]

@jaredly, what is the rubric for deciding which functions go into the sandbox and which don’t?