Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE • Hacker News Board

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#101

Post by extr » Fri, Jun 28, 2024, 5:26 PM UTC

dcreater wrote: post #94

thomas_mock wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was a huge fan of RStudio and was pretty much the biggest reason I used R. But then I realized how bad R is, syntactically, and how much more useful Python and it's ecosystem are. Then I discovered VS code and Jupyter notebooks in VS code which completely sealed the deal. So unless you are in need of specific R data science packages, Python seems like the way to go. I'm quite excited to try Positron!

I don't know. I bought into the Python hype and after a few years I've found myself missing R. If you're using the full python ecosystem more power to you...but for straight up data analysis and statistics, R is unbeatable.

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#102

Post by nickstrayer » Fri, Jun 28, 2024, 6:42 PM UTC

lembcva wrote: post #63

jmcphers wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some thoughtful speculation on this here: "Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture" - https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

Very interesting, I hope the (formerly) RStudio people read this. So they are giving up an IDE (RStudio) that was famous for far better graphics and plotting than the Python alternatives for a half-open third party solution where Posit is the sharecropper. This Microsoft "DevDiv" (see the link) sounds like the classic EEE dressed up as "open", "hip" and with all the right buzzwords.

The person that posted that link is the lead architect on Positron. So yeah it's certainly known about!

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#103

Post by asdff » Fri, Jun 28, 2024, 6:59 PM UTC

ImaCake wrote: post #79

asdff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hardly. Hand holding tools are popular but that doesn't mean they aren't hand holding tools that don't give you any new function you didn't have otherwise. Jupyter notebooks are probably more popular to write than python scripts for new data scientists too, doesn't mean anything though or take away some of the advantages you get writing properly packaged scripts instead of a big old notebook you iterate a pipeline in line by line and figure by figure.

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#104

Post by asdff » Fri, Jun 28, 2024, 7:00 PM UTC

ds_opseeker wrote: post #87

ImaCake wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Its definitely a feedback loop. Every time you look up an R question on stackoverflow people give you a ggplot or dpylr answer and usually not a base package implementation. Its almost as bad as Ole Tang spamming gnu parallel on every xargs thread.

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#105

Post by asdff » Fri, Jun 28, 2024, 7:01 PM UTC

SassyBird wrote: post #69

asdff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The base graphics packages make the plots as ugly as the ones generated by gnuplot though. ggplot2 on the other hand has very pretty output. And the concept of grammar of plots just makes so much sense to me.

You can make plots look however you want with base graphics. ggplot2 users mainly use the default settings honestly, you get that classic grey background plot I personally find more ugly than the cleaner white background defaults of the base package.

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#106

Post by idf00 » Fri, Jun 28, 2024, 8:23 PM UTC

jhbadger wrote: post #92

setopt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing I miss from RStudio is the Rmarkdown documents with inline outputs RMarkdown (Rmd) was recently developed into “Quarto” (Qmd), precisely because they now support Python as well. I’ve used it a bit and it’s excellent.

But Rmd already supported python chunks (as well as other languages such as ruby, which seem to be missing from Qmd)

Quarto supports any language and works just fine. I have quarto blog posts for using APL as an example of a somewhat niche language.

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#107

Post by kyawzazaw » Fri, Jun 28, 2024, 8:25 PM UTC

_Wintermute wrote: post #55

kyawzazaw wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the problem is life sciences and statisticans are not going to learn Python though. and that's the talent

They are though. I work in computational biology, I would say the majority of work I see now is in python.

that's a much much smaller subset than the vast users of R in academic/research

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#108

Post by wdkrnls » Fri, Jun 28, 2024, 8:34 PM UTC

dcreater wrote: post #94

thomas_mock wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was a huge fan of RStudio and was pretty much the biggest reason I used R. But then I realized how bad R is, syntactically, and how much more useful Python and it's ecosystem are. Then I discovered VS code and Jupyter notebooks in VS code which completely sealed the deal. So unless you are in need of specific R data science packages, Python seems like the way to go. I'm quite excited to try Positron!

R has the best syntax of any language I have used. What I hate about R is not the syntax, its all the functionality inside it that was written in hairy C and FORTRAN style. Unfortunately, any system gets written on top of by programmers of legacy systems. The syntax and semantics of R are probably the most elegant of any language I have used. The rules are extremely simple, logical, and transparent and are largely inherited from Scheme. The amount of power it gives developers is unparalleled outside of Common Lisp. So much can be redefined by users. It really is at its core a LISP wrapped in C clothing, but better because few people working on R care at all about compiler optimization. Instead, they all care about late binding and introspection so programmers can figure out what their code is doing. If speed is needed, use C++ (Rcpp). However, in practice R is usually fast enough. Somehow the R developers understood Knuth's proverb that premature optimization was the root of all evil (and wasted effort), but the rest of the world forgot.

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#109

Post by lottin » Fri, Jun 28, 2024, 11:29 PM UTC

SassyBird wrote: post #69

asdff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The base graphics packages make the plots as ugly as the ones generated by gnuplot though. ggplot2 on the other hand has very pretty output. And the concept of grammar of plots just makes so much sense to me.

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. I much prefer the aesthetics of plots made with the lattice package or even base R over ggplot's.

Re: Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE

#110

Post by lottin » Fri, Jun 28, 2024, 11:36 PM UTC

aydyn wrote: post #45

stoperaticless wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/serious/hyped

No. R fundamentally has not really improved in the past ~10 years. Do you know much about how R works? Also try: gsub('serious', 'hyped', x)

Maybe because it already does what it intends to do reasonably well? I mean, what do you think needs to be improved?