41–50 of 51 posts
"Next generation IDE" comes out like every fuckin week. I already tried 3 new ones this month so I'm done. It looks nice tho
> A %PRODUCTNAME% next generation editor/ide is released > Look inside > VS Code
VS Code is the chromium of IDEs. I shall not explain further.
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…
So the main news is that they're giving up on develping an independent IDE and turning into another VS code fork. The loss of biodiversity and reliance on a no-so-reliable steward is mildly concerning.
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So the main news is that they're giving up on develping an independent IDE and turning into another VS code fork. The loss of biodiversity and reliance on a no-so-reliable steward is mildly concerning.
OTOH, posit funds a lot of development of important packages in the tidyverse and does a lot of community work etc. So if maintaining RStudio is so much of a burden that it impedes the rest of their work, I don't think it's a bad idea to reduce the amount of work spent trying to compete with VSCode when that's an increasingly tough sell. I'm not a fan of VSCode personally, but would probably be happy with a tmux setu…
There is Rkward[1], available from the repositories in many linux distributions.
Discovered it recently, because I'm currently learning R, and few linux distributions outside the Mandriva family offer Rstudio straight from the repositories, and I'm lazy to download and do a manual install every time.
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OTOH, posit funds a lot of development of important packages in the tidyverse and does a lot of community work etc. So if maintaining RStudio is so much of a burden that it impedes the rest of their work, I don't think it's a bad idea to reduce the amount of work spent trying to compete with VSCode when that's an increasingly tough sell. I'm not a fan of VSCode personally, but would probably be happy with a tmux setu…
> so people like me should be able to cobble something together that's a workable alternative to Posit. There is Rkward[1], available from the repositories in many linux distributions. Discovered it recently, because I'm currently learning R, and few linux distributions outside the Mandriva family offer Rstudio straight from the repositories, and I'm lazy to download and do a manual install every time. [1] https://rk…
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.
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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 (…
I guess in my mind I was thinking use cases other than AI. Like statistical or hierarchical scientific models, simulations or ETL work. I also don't know if some of the econometricians I know with a less technical background would even know how to get setup with AWS, and I feel more boardly there's enough folks doing data work in a none tech field who know how to use Python or R or Matlab to do their modelling but li…
Since AWS/etc are quite complicated, there are now a swarm of startups trying to make it easier to take baby steps into the cloud (eg. Modal, Runpod, etc) and make it very easy for the user to get a small slice of that GPU pie. These services have drastically simpler server-side APIs and usage patterns, including "serverless" GPUs from Modal, where you can just "submit jobs" from a Python API without really having to manage containers. On the client side, you have LLM coding agents that are the next evolution in UI frontends -- and they're beginning to make it much much easier to write bespoke code to interact with these backends. To make it abundantly clear what target audience I'm referring to: I imagine they are still mostly using sklearn (or equivalents in other languages) and gradient boosting with Jupyter notebooks, still somewhat mystified by modern deep learning and stuff. Or maybe those who are more mathematically sophisticated but not software engg sophisticated (eg: statisticians / econometricians)
To inspire you with a really concrete example: since Modal has a well documented API, it should be quite straight-forward ("soon", if not already) for any data scientist to use one of the CLI coding agents and
1. Implement a decent GPU-friendly version of whatever model they want to try (as long as it's not far from the training distribution i.e. not some esoteric idea which is nothing like prior art)
2. Whip up a quick system to interface with some service provider, wrap that model up and submit a job, and fetch (and even interpret) results.
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In case you haven't tried one of these new-fangled coding agents, I strongly encourage you to try one out (even if it's just something on the free tier eg. gemini-cli). In case you have and they aren't quite good enough to solve your problem, tough luck for now... I anticipate their usability will improve substantially every few months.
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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.