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RStudio is now Posit

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Re: RStudio is now Posit

#11
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. REPL/command-line + Scripts + Plots. I could not be happier using it and I wish I could get VSCode to be half as good. Julia for VSCode is pretty good, but the Python science tooling goes 100% towards notebook environments which I'm not a huge fan of so the Python Science VScode experience is subpar.

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#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.

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#13
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 can be much harder than you'd expect in a lot of fields because questions like "what version of the libraries did you use" has to be answered (if it can be answered at all) by looking at the references in the paper.

Whereas in Python, I don't know how things could be any simpler. Creating an individualized environment for your project is one command. Installing packages that only live inside that environment is one `pip install` away. Most scientific work is not "distributed" in the sense of having users, but if you do ship a product to users, Python gives you the option of either relying on distribution provided packages (my preferred approach most of the time) or shipping a single binary created with something like PyInstaller.

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#14
I used RStudio in my university stats course, along with the strong recommendation by my professor to get the book "OpenIntro Statistics" (3rd edition back then).

[1]

I really couldn't care less about statistics, which like with many other topics/courses made/makes it incredibly hard for me to concentrate on and actually learn something about it. I could force the knowledge into my brain to be able to recite and use it in practice over and over again, but the moment the exams come around it's all gone from my head. That certainly made university very problematic.

[1] Edit to add: I forgot to say that using RStudio was the only remotely pleasant part of that Stats course and in later courses where some stats work was needed.

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#15
post #13
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 think that has more to do with the fact that most scientists are not trained programmers! Plus a lot of data analysis work doesn't lend itself to the same style of programming IMO.

While there could be more effort in getting things like library versions out there a lot of journals don't care so there's no pressure on scientists to provide it.

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#17
I've been a huge fan of the RStudio IDE for its Matlab-like look and feel and its support for R. I hope it continues to improve and continue to be a helpful tool for the community.

Re: RStudio is now Posit

#18
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to speak for the person above, but I've used it a bit. It's like Jupyter Notebook with an eye towards producing really nice looking documents. It's pretty easy to use, though they are still working on it and it may not be feature-complete yet.

How different is it from RMarkdown? I thought is was supposed to be quite similar. Because that is really nice to use when preparing analyses for collaborators. I’d like to get back to having more “compiled” style notebooks for things aside from just R.

It’s the successor to rmarkdown. The same team that worked on rmarkdown are working on quarto.
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