[HN Gopher] RStudio is now Posit
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       RStudio is now Posit
        
       Author : denisw
       Score  : 119 points
       Date   : 2022-11-04 18:44 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (posit.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (posit.co)
        
       | Lev1a wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | nojito wrote:
       | Quarto is absolutely game changing.
        
         | ansgri wrote:
         | Yes it is, I've looked at various options to publish jupyter
         | notebooks, finally found Quarto, and it's a full publishing
         | platform with surprisingly decent UX and easy customizability.
        
         | Lyngbakr wrote:
         | I'm currently rebuilding my personal website with it and I'm
         | really impressed. As with most RStudio products I've
         | encountered over the years, I find it is intuitive, well
         | documented, and quite powerful. I also think RStudio has played
         | an important role in making the R community quite pleasant and
         | inclusive.
        
         | mi_lk wrote:
         | say more? I'm curious
        
           | 1980phipsi wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | mbreese wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | nojito wrote:
               | It's the successor to rmarkdown. The same team that
               | worked on rmarkdown are working on quarto.
        
         | shepherdjerred wrote:
         | I love Quarto! It's so much more pleasant than writing LaTeX,
         | but you still get professional-looking documents with Python
         | graphs that update themselves!
        
         | goosedragons wrote:
         | Is it? I liked Rmarkdown until I discovered org-mode and org-
         | babel. It does a lot of stuff better like the option to tangle
         | chunks into multiple files which is killer (last time I looked
         | Rmarkdown still lacked that, not sure about Quarto) and the
         | ability to do stuff like make a table in my text and then USE
         | it in R for calculations is amazing for making examples or
         | grabbing some random HTML table off a site and doing something.
        
           | tmalsburg2 wrote:
           | Agree. Org-babel makes the alternatives look like toys.
        
       | scottmcdot wrote:
       | I don't understand the post. Are they going to offer a Python IDE
       | equivalent to RStudio?
        
       | forgotpwd16 wrote:
       | RStudio the company changes name. RStudio the IDE will remain
       | named as such (for time being at least).
        
         | kgwgk wrote:
         | It's not just the company.
         | 
         | Some RStudio products change their name - the "enterprise"
         | offering.
         | 
         | Another RStudio product doest't - the open-source IDE.
        
       | toddm wrote:
       | From Hadley's video blurb, the ringer is when he states "things
       | just work" in the R environment vis-a-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!
        
         | bscphil wrote:
         | > 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.
        
           | werewolf wrote:
           | I have had similar experience. For me the most annoying was
           | the work they put in making it difficult (nearly impossible)
           | to use with conda environments.
        
           | Lyngbakr wrote:
           | I've also seen my fair share of garbage R code and I think
           | Gordon Shotwell's comment that "There really are no
           | production languages - only production engineers" speaks to
           | this.[0] A big problem in the scientific community is that
           | scientists aren't trained to write code like production
           | engineers. I don't see it necessarily as being an issue that
           | is endemic to R, though.
           | 
           | Packrat[1] -- an RStudio package -- can be used to easily
           | avoid the library versioning issues you describe. The problem
           | isn't that the tooling isn't there or that it isn't easy to
           | use. It's that some folks simply don't use it and are perhaps
           | oblivious as to /why/ they should even use it, anyway.
           | 
           | [0] https://shotwell.ca/posts/2019-12-30-why-i-use-r/ [1]
           | https://rstudio.github.io/packrat/
        
             | Gimpei wrote:
             | Maybe, but I wonder if it is especially easy to produce
             | horrific code in R. For example, I remember trying to
             | refactor an R codebase that made ample use `load`, leading
             | to all these mysterious variables appearing from nowhere.
        
             | tetris11 wrote:
             | Also R really didn't play well with conda for a while. It
             | seems to be ironed out in recent years, but I remember the
             | issues of previous years where trying to set up a
             | reproducible R environment in conda was an unreliable
             | endeavour.
        
             | dash2 wrote:
             | packrat is a little old. You want renv, which is the
             | iteration of the same idea and I've found works very simply
             | and nicely.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | goosedragons wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | martinsmit wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | c7b wrote:
           | R is great, and so are some of the packages that lead to the
           | tidyverse, but I think the latter was a bit too much. Re-
           | inventing what already worked with new packages, always
           | overloading R syntax in weird ways (looking at you, ggplot2).
           | I've actually found myself moving back to base R for many of
           | the more basic manipulation tasks.
        
           | trts wrote:
           | My workflow for the past year has been develop/analyze in
           | Rstudio and port to Python when ready to deploy to
           | production. Notebooks and VSCode still feel cumbersome to me
           | and not designed as an analytics-first solution.
           | 
           | The time needed to re-write a script in another language, and
           | often using different packages, seems more than made up for
           | by the ease of use of Rstudio.
        
           | modriano wrote:
           | I've found the Jupiter lab IDE to be ideal for my DS and EDA
           | workflows, which typically involves having several notebooks,
           | scripts, and terminal windows open in the IDE. I switched
           | from preferring R to python because having a global shared
           | state across everything in RStudio kept switching the working
           | directory or loading a different file than expected, and I
           | just had very little confidence that things I wrote in R
           | would be reproducible a few years on (which appears to have
           | been a correct concern [0]).
           | 
           | [0] https://datacolada.org/100
        
       | ipsum2 wrote:
       | https://posit.co/products/open-source/rstudio/ It would be useful
       | to put a screenshot or some details about what RStudio is, the
       | page is not very descriptive.
        
       | sakras wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | Yeah, I was wondering why they're renaming to the name of a
         | numerical data type. I posit that the name will cause
         | confusion. :)
        
       | c7b wrote:
       | So this is not about RStudio the IDE but the company?
        
       | kilbuz wrote:
       | The rebrand makes a lot of sense, as the interest and support for
       | Python in the DS/ML community keeps growing. I prefer R for data
       | exploration and visualization, but knowing and leveraging both
       | languages seems to be the way forward. Shiny for Python is a very
       | interesting development.
       | 
       | Kudos to RStudio (Posit) for delivering great product over the
       | last decade+ and growing a kind, helpful community!
        
       | d_sem wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | rossdavidh wrote:
       | If a C-level executive says, "Posit is not about pivoting from R
       | to Python...", then most likely, it's about pivoting from R to
       | Python.
        
         | kingo55 wrote:
         | It's Hadley Wickham of R's tidyverse though, so I'm more
         | inclined to believe the claim.
        
           | swyx wrote:
           | its a beautiful thing when personal credibility cuts through
           | generic cynicism :)
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-04 23:01 UTC)