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Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

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Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#81
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you guys using Copilot? I feel it’s a PITA and interferes in between everytime I try to use it. How do you use it properly?

I work somewhere where they actively encourage copilot, and I actually have some good use-cases. Most of the time it is just autocomplete on steroids. Scanning the suggestion and hitting tab is almost always faster especially if you have to write a lot of repetitive code. Generating useful documentation. I work a lot with legacy codebases. Oftentimes I use copilot to explain what a chunk of code is doing, or give it…

> Most of the time it is just autocomplete on steroids.

imo this is kinda underrated, I use it all the time and it's a real time saver for me. It seems to have a good recall for things you've been doing recently, so it'll make suggestions based on a method I just added or a variable I just declared.

Another fun one I had recently was implementing elo ranking. I'd done some reading so knew what I was doing, but based on the function name and comment it generated the whole thing for me, including all the correct argument names and object properties. Watching it pop up line by line was very cool!

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#82
post #30

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>ported to python are just objectively worse in that language This is absolutely the case. Dplyr syntax is much more intuitive for many use cases than Pandas or Polars equivalents. One thing I miss from RStudio is the Rmarkdown documents with inline outputs. Jupyter notebooks, even in VSCode, are so needlessly over-engineered and under-featured compared to the elegance of RMarkdown. So I am excited to see what Posit…

You might be interested in what we’re building over at Evidence.dev It’s basically RMarkdown for SQL

Neat! I have to deal with splunk at work and every time I do I'm annoyed that they decided to create their own query language.

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#83
post #33

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I'm not sure what would lead to you believe this. I've worked in the data science/ML space for over a decade now and I see the majority of pure analytics projects started in R, including at big tech companies I've worked at recently. Of course, ML projects and other things that need to result in production-grade models are almost always done in Python. This is currently the most visible form of "data project" due to…

Youre wrong. Python is outpacing R in usage. Every metric you can find proves it. R also has fundamental issues and lacks serious development.

Not to dispute because I have no idea so I'll assume you're correct. But how many metrics did you find and how were they obtained? And how would you know they are representative of all R users?

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#84
post #19
post #17

What is the strategy behind the dizzying pace of product changes in the R/Python space? I heard that RStudio was a great product, yet they have to redo everything again, of course also renaming the company as is also standard practice in the Python "scientific" market. Is it Jupyter envy? Why is it not possible to keep one good product and stay with it? I wish MatLab licenses weren't so expensive, at this point I'd j…

As a regular R/bash/python user, I think the Posit philosophy is increasingly to break down barriers between the languages. It's no longer an either/or relationship, you can use both. And some packages or features that have been ported to python are just objectively worse in that language, so the want for R is definitely there. Also, a lot of the Posit team are fully "bilingual", it's not like the old guard of academ…

The creator of pandas Wes McKinney is on the Posit team and working on this project too. Gives some additional credence to the idea of the convergence of tooling.

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#85
post #59

Relatedly, has anyone found a really good extension for interacting with .tsv, .csv, files in VS Code? PyCharm is much nicer on that front.

Did you try the Excel Viewer? It shows CSV files as a table. Doesn’t handle huge files though.

+1 Excel Viewer user, I've heard good things about Data Wrangler as well

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#86

Are they going to drop RStudio? I very much prefer its Qt interface over whatever VSCode invented. It’s fast, has nice keyboard shortcuts, none of that pointless padding and it just feels great to use.

Hey! Product Manager for RStudio here (and Positron).

We have no plans to stop development or maintenance on RStudio, and are committed to it for our users, both paid and community. While Positron and RStudio have some features in common, some R-focused features will remain exclusive to RStudio. If you're currently using RStudio and are happy with the experience, you can continue to enjoy RStudio. RStudio includes 10+ years of applied optimizations for R data analysis and package development.

Cross-posting the FAQ: https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/wiki/Frequently-Asked-...

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#87
post #79
post #35

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I don't even know why people need to use dpyler and the tidyverse, in my opinion R is very comfortable for data wrangling and making all kinds of plots out of the box. Its able to handle huge amounts of data as well especially if you adopt a functional programming approach vs object oriented (what I see with a lot of the classic "academic" brittle hardcoded slop that R gets a bad rap for). Very fast if you keep in mi…

Maybe it is for you, but the success of Dplyr and ggplot suggests a lot of others disagree.

I wonder how much of this is just a feedback loop; were people taught both tools and then chose the one that works best, or was one more heavily promoted than the other, so people went with what was easiest to get started?

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#88

Are they going to drop RStudio? I very much prefer its Qt interface over whatever VSCode invented. It’s fast, has nice keyboard shortcuts, none of that pointless padding and it just feels great to use.

Hey! Product Manager for RStudio here (and Positron). We have no plans to stop development or maintenance on RStudio, and are committed to it for our users, both paid and community. While Positron and RStudio have some features in common, some R-focused features will remain exclusive to RStudio. If you're currently using RStudio and are happy with the experience, you can continue to enjoy RStudio. RStudio includes 10…

It’s great to hear. Thanks.

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#89
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly for boilerplate things like assigning a bunch of thing to a dictionary, it usually knows what I am thinking.

Have you ever stopped to consider why you are writing code like that, and if it is necessary in the first place? I think if you are spamming a lot of code that looks like: thing = params.get('thing') thong = params.get('thong') ... thunk = params.get('thonk') then you probably aren't delivering a lot of value with your code. In fact that overly verbose code could be a liability because it has to be reviewed (possibly…

Try not to write code like this in statically, nominally typed languages (Java, Kotlin, C++, etc.). Without a good compile-time metaprogramming, you're bound to need code like this sooner rather than later [EDIT: you still should try to minimize it; it shouldn't be the first solution you reach for, but it really is unavoidable in many cases]. It's a PITA, but that's just it is in those languages - and Copilot works pretty well as an ad hoc code-gen tool.

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good question. The VS Code extension API is pretty powerful but extensions run separately from the main workbench process and they can't draw any meaningful UI on it. This was a great design decision IMHO as it is the core reason VS Code has a reputation for a minimalist UI and good performance despite being based on Electron. However it also made it impossible to build the kinds of experiences we wanted to with Po…

I'm curious if you would be willing to elaborate on what your plans are for longer term feature parity with vscode? As in I can imagine as vscode receives continued development and new features you will have the development burden of having to integrate these updates into your fork. Are you planning to keep up-to-date with vscode or will the products essentially drift a part over time? If the latter would this mean e…

We merge upstream from VS Code every month and we plan to keep up to date with it, so extensions will continue to work and we'll continue to inherit new features as they become available.

It's a development burden for sure -- but still an order of magnitude cheaper than trying to build a good workbench surface from scratch.

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