The profiler integration is so cool! I've never seen anything like that in a free tool.
AFAIK RStudio is now being lead by JJ Allaire, same person who did Coldfusion and stuff. Also in there is Hadley Wickham, of ggplot2 / dplyr fame.
Announcing RStudio v1.0
21–30 of 68 posts
Re: Announcing RStudio v1.0
#22I've been co-teaching a class in computing for statisticians this semester (some details on the previous iteration here https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2016-01-22-stat-computing.htm... ) and have mixed feelings about RStudio. Most of our students use RStudio for their work. It's convenient and easy. For developing standalone scripts or functions, rather than notebooks or R Markdown files, the typical workflow is to wr…
Isn't this a simple instruction you give students in the very first class like "before you submit your homework, restart R session, and make sure your submission runs in the new session"? This only requires them to click a menu item (Restart R session), and a button (Knit or Source or something). Not really a burden for them, but will save your life as the instructor.
As someone who had been a student in statistics for more than 10 years, I confess I had never written a single test for my homework. Frankly I just didn't have the time or interest (too much homework, and becoming a professional software engineer was not the goal of the homework assignments). That said, when I put on my software engineer hat now at work, I'd definitely do what you advertise here and write tests carefully. If you want your students to enjoy the benefits of both R packages and R Markdown, I wrote some thoughts here a couple of years ago: http://yihui.name/rlp/
Don't get me wrong. I'll all for teaching students good practice of software engineering. I just want to speak from my own memories and experience as a student. Sometimes I feel teachers are like parents: they want kids to learn all possible right things, no matter if they are practically able to swallow all the good stuff (sometimes this has bad psychological consequences, like rebellious children). If I were an instructor in statistics, I'd only require students to submit an R Markdown document. Other things like tests can earn extra credits but not required.
Re: Announcing RStudio v1.0
#23I've been co-teaching a class in computing for statisticians this semester (some details on the previous iteration here https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2016-01-22-stat-computing.htm... ) and have mixed feelings about RStudio. Most of our students use RStudio for their work. It's convenient and easy. For developing standalone scripts or functions, rather than notebooks or R Markdown files, the typical workflow is to wr…
I've required my students to turn in knitted pdf's from their R Markdown code. This course is more of an applied stats class, rather than stat computing, which I guess might make more sense. But it does ensure reproducibility (mostly, once we do away with working directories!).
My difficulty is more that for most of these students, this is their first time using R or a real programming language. I had hoped that R Markdown would make the process simpler and more sensible. But the tendency of a student is to try different things, and not have a strong understanding of the logic behind those processes. So they create R Markdown files, and then gripe about how the code works in their IDE, but doesn't knit, and so knitr must be broken!
Re: Announcing RStudio v1.0
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
R Notebooks are such a killer feature!
Funny, many people say this, but iPython notebooks have been around for a while (now called Jupyter Notebooks since they are not Python specific anymore) and it didn't spur a massive migration to Python...at least as far as I can tell. Not a bad thing, it's just R Notebooks kind of seem like old news to me. Addendum: I looked it up and it appears that Jupyter Notebooks actually have an R kernel ( https://irkernel.git…
iPython notebooks don't have the functionality of R Notebooks.
R Notebooks allow you to prepare something for presentation, not just for running/testing. I.e.: You can run code and then choose to present the code and the output, just the code, just the output or none of them (for instance just putting a sentence in the presentation where you say you applied some mathematical function to the data, but show the mathematica function (latex) instead of the code.
This is really important to publish and to present data and it's not possible to do in Jupyter/iPhython.
Also, it allows you to export directly to HTML/PDF. Something Jupyter doesn't.
Re: Announcing RStudio v1.0
#25I've been co-teaching a class in computing for statisticians this semester (some details on the previous iteration here https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2016-01-22-stat-computing.htm... ) and have mixed feelings about RStudio. Most of our students use RStudio for their work. It's convenient and easy. For developing standalone scripts or functions, rather than notebooks or R Markdown files, the typical workflow is to wr…
If you really want them to write "well-tested and modular algorithmic code" then you should teach them how to write packages in RStudio. Then require everything submitted to be in RMarkdown.
I mentor learning data scientists and my advice is always to start using RMarkdown as soon they're remotely comfortable with RStudio. Not only does it avoid issues with an easily polluted global namespace, but more importantly encourages literate programming from the early stages. In stats/data science literate programming is vital to having any idea what you were working on a few months ago. It also makes writing reports much, much easier.
RStudio makes it pretty easy to put together R packages, and the package structure for R does a great job of enforcing proper documentation and testing. Sourcing R files should primarily be used to quickly play around with ideas, or for exploratory data analysis that doesn't fit well inside an RMarkdown document. Any code you intended on reusing between projects should end up in a local package.
I do think it's a problem that R has no intermediate method of organizing code like simple modules in Python. But this means if you're serious about writing clean R, you just have to bite the bullet and teach students to write packages.
Re: Announcing RStudio v1.0
#26I've been co-teaching a class in computing for statisticians this semester (some details on the previous iteration here https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2016-01-22-stat-computing.htm... ) and have mixed feelings about RStudio. Most of our students use RStudio for their work. It's convenient and easy. For developing standalone scripts or functions, rather than notebooks or R Markdown files, the typical workflow is to wr…
It feels like you are pinning a problem on RStudio that isn't RStudio's fault? A hammer is not a bad tool because it allows you to drive a nail into your own foot.
Re: Announcing RStudio v1.0
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny, many people say this, but iPython notebooks have been around for a while (now called Jupyter Notebooks since they are not Python specific anymore) and it didn't spur a massive migration to Python...at least as far as I can tell. Not a bad thing, it's just R Notebooks kind of seem like old news to me. Addendum: I looked it up and it appears that Jupyter Notebooks actually have an R kernel ( https://irkernel.git…
I think it's the fact that RStudio's notebooks are well-integrated into the IDE: so debugging, profiling, the panel listing the variables in the current workspace, and all the other niceties of the IDE still work with the notebook interface. I don't know of any equivalent to that in Jupyter.
Exactly right! The environment pane of RStudio and its related dev & debugging tools are available for use whether you're authoring a traditional script file or an R Notebook. It would be awesome if such facilities were available when working with Jupyter notebooks, but that is not presently the case.
Re: Announcing RStudio v1.0
#28For all the naysayers... Try installing python/jupyter in a corporate environment. It was a no go from the start at the last 4 companies I have worked at.
R and RStudio just installed and worked for 3 of the 4 companies. The 4th required a tweak to one environmental variable and everything installed/worked after that.
Corporate IT restrictions can make or break software.
Re: Announcing RStudio v1.0
#29we have recently started migrating to python from R because of notebooks and pyspark. I dont see us moving back anytime soon, because production code in python is orders of magnitude better than R. I just wish there was a decent dplyr for python though :(
There is a HUGE difference between running production code and exploratory analysis. Python with Jupyter (however good in production they are) are just not fit for that task. After all, Python is a general-purpose programming language and R is largely a DSL designed specifically for figuring things out as quick as possible. And R is really good at it.
Re: Announcing RStudio v1.0
#30For all the naysayers... Try installing python/jupyter in a corporate environment. It was a no go from the start at the last 4 companies I have worked at. R and RStudio just installed and worked for 3 of the 4 companies. The 4th required a tweak to one environmental variable and everything installed/worked after that. Corporate IT restrictions can make or break software.
The flip side is that RStudio is AGPL [1] – although not too surprisingly this is not heavily advertised. It may be easy to setup, but your legal department will have a heart attack if they find out that you're using it. At some point, RStudio will ask you to comply with the AGPL or pay them for a non-AGPL license.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License