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RStudio is now Posit

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Re: RStudio is now Posit

#21

Post by Lyngbakr »

bscphil wrote: post #13
toddm wrote: post #7

From Hadley's video blurb, the ringer is when he states "things just work" in the R environment vis-à-vis python (where he tactfully yet implicitly acknowledges the shitshow that is the python library/package/environment management). Kudos to the R community and supporters for providing a great and useful platform!

> acknowledges the shitshow that is the python library/package/environment management I'm puzzled by this and wonder if you can provide some examples. The scientists I know tend to have incredibly disorganized R code, with a bunch of hard-coded paths and a single global environment in their home directory that all their R packages get installed to. Even stuff that seems critically important like reproducible science…

I've also seen my fair share of garbage R code and I think Gordon Shotwell's comment that "There really are no production languages – only production engineers" speaks to this.[0] A big problem in the scientific community is that scientists aren't trained to write code like production engineers. I don't see it necessarily as being an issue that is endemic to R, though.

Packrat[1] — an RStudio package — can be used to easily avoid the library versioning issues you describe. The problem isn't that the tooling isn't there or that it isn't easy to use. It's that some folks simply don't use it and are perhaps oblivious as to /why/ they should even use it, anyway.

[0] https://shotwell.ca/posts/2019-12-30-why-i-use-r/ [1] https://rstudio.github.io/packrat/

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#22

Post by werewolf »

bscphil wrote: post #13
toddm wrote: post #7

From Hadley's video blurb, the ringer is when he states "things just work" in the R environment vis-à-vis python (where he tactfully yet implicitly acknowledges the shitshow that is the python library/package/environment management). Kudos to the R community and supporters for providing a great and useful platform!

> acknowledges the shitshow that is the python library/package/environment management I'm puzzled by this and wonder if you can provide some examples. The scientists I know tend to have incredibly disorganized R code, with a bunch of hard-coded paths and a single global environment in their home directory that all their R packages get installed to. Even stuff that seems critically important like reproducible science…

I have had similar experience. For me the most annoying was the work they put in making it difficult (nearly impossible) to use with conda environments.

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#23

Post by kingo55 »

rossdavidh wrote: post #16

If a C-level executive says, "Posit is not about pivoting from R to Python...", then most likely, it's about pivoting from R to Python.

It's Hadley Wickham of R's tidyverse though, so I'm more inclined to believe the claim.

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#24

Post by tetris11 »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #21
bscphil wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> acknowledges the shitshow that is the python library/package/environment management I'm puzzled by this and wonder if you can provide some examples. The scientists I know tend to have incredibly disorganized R code, with a bunch of hard-coded paths and a single global environment in their home directory that all their R packages get installed to. Even stuff that seems critically important like reproducible science…

I've also seen my fair share of garbage R code and I think Gordon Shotwell's comment that "There really are no production languages – only production engineers" speaks to this.[0] A big problem in the scientific community is that scientists aren't trained to write code like production engineers. I don't see it necessarily as being an issue that is endemic to R, though. Packrat[1] — an RStudio package — can be used to…

Also R really didn't play well with conda for a while. It seems to be ironed out in recent years, but I remember the issues of previous years where trying to set up a reproducible R environment in conda was an unreliable endeavour.

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#25

Post by goosedragons »

nojito wrote: post #3

Quarto is absolutely game changing.

Is it? I liked Rmarkdown until I discovered org-mode and org-babel. It does a lot of stuff better like the option to tangle chunks into multiple files which is killer (last time I looked Rmarkdown still lacked that, not sure about Quarto) and the ability to do stuff like make a table in my text and then USE it in R for calculations is amazing for making examples or grabbing some random HTML table off a site and doing something.

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#26

Post by modriano »

martinsmit wrote: post #11
toddm wrote: post #7

From Hadley's video blurb, the ringer is when he states "things just work" in the R environment vis-à-vis python (where he tactfully yet implicitly acknowledges the shitshow that is the python library/package/environment management). Kudos to the R community and supporters for providing a great and useful platform!

As a relatively new programmer who entered it through statistics, I've still yet to have a better UX or "it just works" moment than using the tidyverse. Years after moving to Julia, Python, and Rust I still go back to R to do any tabular data work. Speed isn't an issue, I always have data.table, and I'm productive in a way that I could only hope to be while doing non tabular data tasks. RStudio is the perfect IDE. RE…

I've found the Jupiter lab IDE to be ideal for my DS and EDA workflows, which typically involves having several notebooks, scripts, and terminal windows open in the IDE. I switched from preferring R to python because having a global shared state across everything in RStudio kept switching the working directory or loading a different file than expected, and I just had very little confidence that things I wrote in R would be reproducible a few years on (which appears to have been a correct concern [0]).

[0] https://datacolada.org/100

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#27

Post by c7b »

martinsmit wrote: post #11
toddm wrote: post #7

From Hadley's video blurb, the ringer is when he states "things just work" in the R environment vis-à-vis python (where he tactfully yet implicitly acknowledges the shitshow that is the python library/package/environment management). Kudos to the R community and supporters for providing a great and useful platform!

As a relatively new programmer who entered it through statistics, I've still yet to have a better UX or "it just works" moment than using the tidyverse. Years after moving to Julia, Python, and Rust I still go back to R to do any tabular data work. Speed isn't an issue, I always have data.table, and I'm productive in a way that I could only hope to be while doing non tabular data tasks. RStudio is the perfect IDE. RE…

R is great, and so are some of the packages that lead to the tidyverse, but I think the latter was a bit too much. Re-inventing what already worked with new packages, always overloading R syntax in weird ways (looking at you, ggplot2). I've actually found myself moving back to base R for many of the more basic manipulation tasks.

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#29

Post by layer8 »

sakras wrote: post #12

I first thought this was an announcement about how R now uses Posits instead of IEEE-754 floats… I wonder if the rebrand will cause any confusion for either party down the line.

Yeah, I was wondering why they’re renaming to the name of a numerical data type. I posit that the name will cause confusion. :)

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#30

Post by Gimpei »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #21
bscphil wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> acknowledges the shitshow that is the python library/package/environment management I'm puzzled by this and wonder if you can provide some examples. The scientists I know tend to have incredibly disorganized R code, with a bunch of hard-coded paths and a single global environment in their home directory that all their R packages get installed to. Even stuff that seems critically important like reproducible science…

I've also seen my fair share of garbage R code and I think Gordon Shotwell's comment that "There really are no production languages – only production engineers" speaks to this.[0] A big problem in the scientific community is that scientists aren't trained to write code like production engineers. I don't see it necessarily as being an issue that is endemic to R, though. Packrat[1] — an RStudio package — can be used to…

Maybe, but I wonder if it is especially easy to produce horrific code in R. For example, I remember trying to refactor an R codebase that made ample use `load`, leading to all these mysterious variables appearing from nowhere.
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