[setgree]

This problem is one reason why I'm a little mystified by Juypter's widespread adoption. It's got a lot of neat features but the Rstudio/Rmarkdown combo solves the above problem, and for me at least, that's decisive. As a tradeoff, you deal with an IDE that, in a bunch of ways, adds friction to writing Python code; but I gather that the Rstudio team is working on that (https://www.rstudio.com/solutions/r-and-python/). Not trying to start a flamewar here, I actually just don't get why Jupyter has become the default.

(Caveat that Jupyter is way better with e.g. Julia, in my (limited) experience)

[pizza]

For R&D the feedback loops are much tighter for sketching an algorithm line by line in Jupyter vs a Python file. Error in the 20th function? Ok fine then I’ll just change the cell it’s defined in and continue from the state of after the 19th. If I forget the layout or type of an object, just inspect it right there in a new cell.

Especially if it deals with multimedia, can just blit images or audio or HTML applications inline.

And it’s fairly trivial to go from Jupyter Notebook -> Python file once you’re done.

[mellavora]

I think the author was comparing R and Python, not Python and Jupyter.

[disgruntledphd2]

Specifically I think they were comparing rmarkdown vs jupyter. And it's really no contest, all the things people hate about jupyter are solved by rmarkdown (and org mode, but that's a harder sell)

[323]

The problem with RStudio is that it uses R, which while excellent at numerical calculations, is terrible at everything else - data parsing, string munging, file processing, ...

As the joke goes: The best thing about R is that it's designed by statisticians. The worst thing about R is that it's designed by statisticians.

[mellavora]

evidence that R is terrible at everything else?

specifically "data parsing", "string munging", and "file processing"?

I've used R extensively for all of these, and having recently re-visited the python world don't see any advantage that Python has over R for any of these tasks.

[alexilliamson]

RStudio has pretty amazing python support now FYI

[linspace]

My wife has been learning Python (not a programmer) and now is looking at R. I thought she was going to like it as I personally think RStudio is nice. I was surprised she didn't like Rmarkdown after being exposed to Python notebooks, in particular she loved vscode + notebooks and immediate feedback and didn't like at all not having the markdown in RStudio interactively rendered and the R REPL. I have used very little R and I'm a heavy Python user so maybe I didn't know how to help her more effectively. I think I helped solving the main Python pain points: installing anaconda, vscode, the python extension and some additional auto completion. I don't use vscode (use Emacs) but it's great it's available for newbie users :p. Also, having Colab was nice for simple things.

To summarize: I think notebooks are great for newcomers. It requires more maturity to appreciate more principled programming.

[setgree]

I wonder what she would make of writing Python in Rstudio & to an Rmd? Rstudio is trying to get people on board with this e.g. https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023654474-I...

[linspace]

Well, it would be the opposite to what we want: R inside vscode. Anyway, we have yet to try R inside jupyter notebooks