[nerdponx]

Why do all these tools pretend that knitr / R Markdown never existed, and that they have invented some novel concept? I looked through the docs of Quarto, Jupytext, and now Codebraid, and none of them mention prior art.

There's a long legacy here, it does nobody any good to disregard it. Maybe Knuth is well-acknowledged for his invention, but I think for instance Yihui Xie is a little under-recognized.

[hadley]

Is there some way we could advertise this better? The quarto homepage already says “Quarto is a multi-language, next generation version of R Markdown from Posit, with many new new features and capabilities.”

When talking about Quarto within the R community we usually frame it this way, but obviously it’s not a very useful description if you’ve never heard of RMarkdown.

[nerdponx]

If that's how you frame it, then I stand corrected and I apologize for my incorrect criticism.

[2cynykyl]

From what I can tell, Quarto is essentially an installer for Knitr/R, that also comes with a bunch of goodies, like when working in VSC (or Rstudio) it auto-suggests cross-references to content in the document, like figures/chapters/equations/etc. It also has a github action that builds and deploys the site in like 1 one line. Just removing the friction and lowering the bar is very helpful sometimes.

[hadley]

That's true, but quarto also has full support for Python and Jupyter notebooks, not to mention julia, and observable. It's really built from the ground up to be multi-language so that everyone can benefit from all the goodies in RMarkdown.

[pmags]

And knitr is built on the prior art foundations of Sweave....

[hadley]

And sweave is built on noweb :)

[pmags]

...which was based on CWEB/WEB and so on... ;-)

Though I guess we can stop there in this particular case, unless someone knows of an example of literate programming that precedes Knuth. I'd be interested if there are such examples...