Live data from Hacker News

Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R

posit.co

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R

#21
post #2

Formerly RStudio > RStudio (now Posit) was founded in 2009 with the vision of creating high quality open-source software for data scientists. We’ve grown exponentially over time but our culture remains unchanged. We invest heavily in open-source development, education, and the community with the goal of serving knowledge creators 100 years from now. > We want Posit to serve a meaningful public purpose and we run the…

I sent this to an R friend, and he was like, "yeah, it's been changed for a few years now". Is he missing something or has there been a major version or something?

May be mixing-up the company change with the IDE: Posit, the company, was named a few years ago, whereas Positron, the IDE, is new.

Re: Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R

#22
post #12

I know "next-generation" is just SEO slop, but I'm going to hyper fixate on this for a moment (so feel free to ignore if you're actually interested in Positron). I think the future of data science will likely be something else, with the advent of WebGPU[1] (which isn't just a web technology) and the current quality/availability of GPUs in end user devices, and a lot of data computation clearly standing to benefit fro…

It's worth considering what nextgen really would be, but probably VSCode and its forks will dominate for the time being. I recall Steve Yegge predicting that the next IDE to beat be the web browser, and this was around 2008 or so. It's not the reality, but took about 10-15 years for it to actually happen, even though there were earlier shots at it by like Atom.

Re: Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R

#23

Oof. That's a damn shame. I think languages and use-cases like this are the perfect place for purpose built IDE development. If even these guys are turning into a VS Code downstream that's just sad. Coincidentally I was thinking of giving R another go, but honestly now... I'm good...

Who cares if it's VSCodium-based?

I feel like a lot of these can be packaged as an extension for vscode. I'd rather not have multiple different variations of the same ide, too much duplication.

Re: Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R

#25
post #2

Formerly RStudio > RStudio (now Posit) was founded in 2009 with the vision of creating high quality open-source software for data scientists. We’ve grown exponentially over time but our culture remains unchanged. We invest heavily in open-source development, education, and the community with the goal of serving knowledge creators 100 years from now. > We want Posit to serve a meaningful public purpose and we run the…

Not true.

But the community can maintain it.

The Rstudio users can give a roadmap and ask for help.

Re: Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R

#26
I hope positron works out fine, last time I checked it was not yet usable.

Replacing Rstudio with something more reliable would be nice, because of some major design flaws Rstudio has. A lot of the UI stuff runs also in R, so when the R kernel dies, quite often I cannot save unsaved files. So I need to copy the file content to a different text editor when that happens. I also don't understand why the LLM-Chat window is running inside the R console, and then blocks running R code. That makes it completely unusable.

Re: Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R

#28

Oof. That's a damn shame. I think languages and use-cases like this are the perfect place for purpose built IDE development. If even these guys are turning into a VS Code downstream that's just sad. Coincidentally I was thinking of giving R another go, but honestly now... I'm good...

If (That's a big if) they can give RStudio experience in VSCode environment, benefiting from the plugin ecosystem etc. why not? RStudio is great when you are doing your own thing, but when it comes to more generic tools like Git, LLM, Autoformatting etc. it's a hard pass.

The why not is that they'll constantly be wrestling with, and limited by the generalist nature of a tool like VS Code. While generalism has its benefits and its drawbacks, what it most definitely does not give you is a fully bespoke experience, by its very definition, and I'm simply bemoaning that specific loss, because I like to see specialised tools sometimes.

Re: Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R

#29

Oof. That's a damn shame. I think languages and use-cases like this are the perfect place for purpose built IDE development. If even these guys are turning into a VS Code downstream that's just sad. Coincidentally I was thinking of giving R another go, but honestly now... I'm good...

Who cares if it's VSCodium-based?

I like seeing specialised, bespoke tools existing, that's all.

Re: Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R

#30
post #12

I know "next-generation" is just SEO slop, but I'm going to hyper fixate on this for a moment (so feel free to ignore if you're actually interested in Positron). I think the future of data science will likely be something else, with the advent of WebGPU[1] (which isn't just a web technology) and the current quality/availability of GPUs in end user devices, and a lot of data computation clearly standing to benefit fro…

Interesting question. I don't know much about WebGPU, but I'd posit (heh!) that the GPU on the client devices doesn't matter too much since folks will likely be working over the network anyways (cloud-based IDE, coding agent connected to cloud-hosted LLM, etc) and we also have innovations like Modal which allow serverless lambdas for GPUs.

As long as silicon is scarce it would make sense to hoard it and rent it out (pricing as a means of managing scarcity); if we end up in a scenario where silicon is plentiful, then everyone would have powerful local GPUs, using local AI models, etc.

Post reply on HN