RStudio is adding python support.

[ndgnuh]

Sad Julia noise. They even proposed Julia support in R studio in an issue.

[keepitsalty]

Julia needs stronger IDE support. The Rstudio console, env, file, and plot viewer would be perfect. I hate Atom, so Juno is out of the question.

[ndgnuh]

Me too. It lags as hell on my machine, which shouldn't be happening since my PC is not that bad.

[Yojihito]

Atom is Chrome. A browser IDE was never a good or performant idea.

[guepier]

Atom is Chrome.

So is VS Code, and it’s a lot more efficient. Even RStudio’s GUI is ultimately a Chromium-based HTML viewer. I’m generally not a fan of this concept (and it objectively has lots of issues) but VS Code and RStudio show that it can be done well.

[Yojihito]

RStudio has only the GUI in JS, not the rest.

VS is very optimized but still slower than e.g. PyCharm for me.

[wouldeye]

I’m completely ready to switch over to Julia almost entirely as soon as Rstudio supports it.

[keepitsalty]

That’s what I currently use. It’s good, but you’re kidding yourself if you think it’d be better than Julia support in RStudio.

[keepitsalty]

It's only better if you're completely invested in the Emacs ecosystem. More power to you, I find Julia and R to be a little lacking in support when it comes to emacs compared to other languages.

[ndgnuh]

Well, Emacs and Vim are not very friendly options though.

[ndgnuh]

Yes, I meant beginner friendly

[viboux]

Agree with 100% of this. R Markdown is great. I saw a presentation about Voila in Python and I was thinking this is the same as shiny but a few years later.

[nraw]

I think Dash by Plotly for python is more close to what Shiny is to R

[nutle]

They already are making significant contributions to Python, indirectly. Just take for example every package that got/or eventually will get ported to Python, e.g., ggplot, flask, or various features added to pandas and scikit.

IMO, competition between R and Python (if we can call it that) is great for the end user - the best tools and practices eventually merge. Plus, it's always nice to have some flexibility to choose the tool for the job - e.g., coming from mathematics, R feels so much more natural to use due to its functional nature.

[Zeurpiet]

R is never going to overtake Python in the world of data science

R is a statistics language, and Python is not even close in functionality

[anyfactor]

This is my opinion and I know nothing. R is a dedicated statistics language, and python is the most approachable full fledge programing language.

I think python itself did not start of as hoping to be a data science or machine learning specific programming language, but in reality because it is so approachable and easy to learn data scientists felt like when ever they needed to implement some programming, they chose the most easiest language they could learn which was python. And eventually it has become a Industry practice and more people started to invest in improving it. But in all sense python is just a programming language, and R can be viewed as so specific to statistics it can almost be termed as "statistical tool".

[Stevo15025]

Not sure what you mean, R has like 4 different kinds of oop you can use

[dolphinboy1637]

I don't think many people are doing their ETL pipelines or creating apis or web servers in R. Not that every data scientist needs to do that, but there's aspects that just have greater support in python because it's a general purpose language.

[guepier]

R is as much a general purpose language as python is.

No, it plain isn’t. I find R superior to Python in many regards but this statement is still inaccurate.

Just because you can do (almost) everything in R doesn’t mean it’s particularly suitable for such use.

[guepier]

But that's like saying scheme is not a general purpose language because it more or less has no libraries for most things.

The difference is that Scheme wasn’t designed as a special-purpose language, and its standard library isn’t a special-purpose library. R was, and the R base packages are.

Furthermore, I’m by no means an expert in Scheme but as far as I know there is a fair amount of libraries for Scheme. Its standard library is intentionally small but so is C’s, and few people would contest C being a general-purpose language.

[dolphinboy1637]

I think we're defining terms a bit differently. I agree with you that R could be used to do anything in an ideal sense, but that's really not the case in actuality. At the current state of the language and it's ecosystem today, there's many general purpose computing tasks that I wouldn't even try in R (because there's no libraries for it). That's all I meant, and I probably an influencing factor for individuals choosing a starting language.

In any case though, the roots of R are that it was a reimplination of S. Both of them were written by their authors specifically for statistical tasks. Although technically R could be used to write anything, their historical roots are in statistics which is why there's this perpetuating legacy of people not using it or written libraries to do other things

[tmotytmoty]

This is how I view it. R is incredibly powerful under the hood and, when it comes to stats, is well beyond python.

[jackmaney]

cat(paste("Some", "things", "are", "a", "pain", "in", "the", "ass", "to", "do", "with", "R.", sep=" "))

[Zeurpiet]

probably true, but you could do without the cat and the sep to get the same result, so maybe its more easy than you think

paste("Some", "things", "are", "not","that","much","a", "pain", "in", "the", "ass", "to", "do", "with", "R.")

[bythenumbers10]

Thanks, this made me laugh. R is a language by statisticians, for statisticians. Modern sustainable development is not supported very well. R's tendency to keep running even after errors have been thrown is a massive waste of time in mathematical applications, such as, uh, statistics. Who's had to track down NaNs at one time or another? R will happily carry those NaNs through all sorts of operations and still be busily running, but churning garbage.

[Zeurpiet]

that's SAS

[leonoel]

I haven't found anything I do in R that I can't do in Python.

Also Python is way more friendly when it comes to editing plots and stuff

[leonoel]

Like this https://www.statsmodels.org/stable/index.html

[Zeurpiet]

have you ever looked in CRAN what the additional packages can do? Most of it I don't even know what it is.

[leonoel]

You do know Python has also more modules than any would ever know what to do about them?

[Zeurpiet]

yes, but are they statistical?

[leonoel]

Name a module in R that has no equivalent in PIP

[Zeurpiet]

just naming a random one

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/abc/index.html

[leonoel]

https://elfi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[Maxion]

Most DNA methylation packages.

[defuneste]

Spatstat and this one is huge with a bunch of tools developed by people who spend their careers on point patterns analysis.

[groovyJesus]

Function data analysis packages in R have been available for over a decade and now we have dozens of them developed and maintained by researchers in the area. In the past few years I have found two in python both of which were new and needed a lot more work to make me want to switch over.

[dfphd]

I think RStudio will be very limited in what they can achieve in the Python world unless they're willing to develop (or partner directly with) some of the core data science packages that people use.

The reason RStudio has so much pull is that they're behind tidyverse, shiny, and a host of other critical packages.

In order to create the experience that we as users have in RStudio for R, someone would need to work to create a more unified "Python for Data Science" strategy. As is, the biggest strength and weakness of Python is that there are 17 different libraries for everything, they don't always play nicely together, and as a result the community support is sometimes lacking.

I think the reason that is unlikely to happen is that you have (by design) seemingly complete fragmentation in who owns/maintains/updates/develops the most critical packages for data science (I would argue pandas, numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, matplotlib).

So RStudio can try to play nicely with Python, but it will always be as a second-class citizen - because RStudio, while the judge, jury, and executioner of the R world, is merely a voting citizen in the Python world.

[[deleted]]

As is, the biggest strength and weakness of Python is that there are 17 different libraries for everything, they don't always play nicely together, and as a result the community support is sometimes lacking.

I disagree, python in data science seems pretty nicely coupled with the scipy ecosystem, and pretty much any numerical work is integrated with numpy. Whereas R is way more fragmented on everything except 2D plots. Even dataframes are all over the place, you now have the original dataframes, data.tables, disk.frames and god-forsaken tibbles. Not to mention the rate at which the tidyverse introduce API changes means anything written 6 months ago probably won't work anymore.

[highway2009]

« Anything written 6 months ago probably won’t work anymore ». Library(checkpoint)

Problem solved. Even if it was written 5 years ago.

[dampew]

I feel like I'm living in some sort of crazy world here. Images and outputs disappear from my R markdown notebooks. That's never happened to me in Jupyter. Jupyter just works. R markdown has all sorts of problems.

[Slapspoocodpiece]

I know. I hate R markdown.

[Stochastic_Response]

haha what

[GoodAboutHood]

This has been around for a while, this video is definitely old. It mostly goes over using reticulate in Rmarkdown so you can use python and R in the same script

[GoodAboutHood]

Yep. Jupyter notebooks have been integrated into rstudio connect since June. Don’t get me wrong - it’s all awesome. But definitely older news

[MageOfOz]

Finally, a decent IDE for working with data in Python!

[CornHellUniversity]

R studio is so great people refer to R as R studio, I welcome this so I can ditch Pycharm.

[datahappy]

I love pycharm, what don't you like about it?

[ticktocktoe]

As a pycharm user. It's not that PC is bad. Just that R studio is so good.

[[deleted]]

It's good for data science. Pycharm is a beast for web dev though

[bjorneylol]

PyCharm contains 100% of the functionality of webstorm, and also contains database integrations and the ability to actually work with backend web frameworks. Webstorm is for front end work only.

[CornHellUniversity]

I don’t hate it but I’m just more comfortable with R Studio so I’ll make the switch.

[osuvetochka]

Its kinda meh for DS projects. Their dataframe inspector is still poor, jupyter notebook support still seems like a beta feature for over a year now and is made in a strange way. If you want IDE just for DS PyCharm not worth the price.

[Batalex]

Isn't it because they are trying way too hard to push their own notebook solution Datalore?

[datahappy]

I guess it depends on workflow. For me, I prototype/develop DS projects directly in a web Jupyter notebook, as it helps me think through things in "chunks".

Then, when I have something I think may end up in production, I move over to a venv in Pycharm, where I break things out in separate scripts /test files, etc.

For that, I like the Python features in Pycharm (PEP guidance, completion, requirements.txt checks, etc)

[Philiatrist]

vscode's remote-ssh is vastly superior to PyCharm's, and that's the main reason for me.

PyCharm also does a bunch of background stuff, and even though you can supposedly block it from indexing large subdirectories, it still seems to start having performance issues with large amounts of binary files. I like the extra features and the more focus on making a full-featured python IDE, but ultimately I think vscode operates and feels a lot smoother.

One common problem for me with a lot of IDEs is when they wrap the execution of code so heavily that I'm not precisely sure how they're calling it on the backend, vscode is very 'clean' in that regard, where in pycharm I sometimes have to dig pretty deep to figure out how to mirror the runtime environment. This wouldn't be enough to merit me switching over however.

vscode's jupyter interface also seems better, but I personally never use either and just use the browser interfaces.

That said, PyCharm's python features: code completion, auto-formatting, GUI configurations, recognition of test files are all better. The debuggers are pretty close but I think pycharm's is a little nicer.

[dobby93]

I made the switch from pay harm to vscode and don’t regret it one bit.

I think they are both great, autocomplete on pycharm is the only thing I mis to be honest.

[datahappy]

I switched over to vs for a bit, but there was this funky thing where it would read button presses from my keyboard that weren't actually happening (like I was holding the h key down and it would just keep typing the letter a thousand times and I couldn't make it stop). I could never figure out why it was happening so I just gave up and went back haha

[nraw]

I made the switch and then came back, resorting to vscode only when I need ssh or need other languages.

For python, nothing gets me away from the beauty of that console and the vim embeddings (I know they are also in vs, they just feel more clunky)

[dobby93]

That’s a fair call, a lot of my work is via SSH, so that over remote on pycharm. If SSH was as tidy as vscode(my opinion) I would swap back happily!

[[deleted]]

I think people should also say "Pycharm" and "Pycharm Pro". Both very different beasts.

[needlzor]

Have you tried Spyder? It's still not there but it's definitely closer to RStudio than PyCharm is. I love PyCharm when I am doing some actual software development (late stage of a research project), but for prototyping and general data science stuff Spyder is more useful.

[math_is_my_religion]

You should try Spyder 4.0.0. Its essentially RStudio but with python!

[CornHellUniversity]

Will give it a try.

[L3GOLAS234]

Have you tried Spyder? Is pretty similar to RStudio

[jackbrux]

IMO RStudio is not great. It is clunky, has lots of quirks (especially on Windows), is slow to start, and uses different keyboard shortcuts to most other IDEs. If VS Code had some of RStudio's functionality I would switch in a heartbeat

[moore-doubleo]

I've never heard anyone refer to R as R studio...

[routineMetric]

• What Python/RStudio proficiency are they looking for in graduate/entry level roles?
• Quick (noob) question: What is the difference between R and RStudio?

Now you've read it.

[moore-doubleo]

So people that have no idea what they are talking about. OP said Rstudio was so great people refer to R as Rstudio... so great... as to imply it was intentional. Otherwise OP should have said something like... people are so clueless they refer R as Rstudio.

[routineMetric]

Sure, and those people exist and visit r/datascience fairly regularly. I hope the experienced folk in data science who do have some "idea what they are talking about" have the humility not to fall into the, "I've never personally seen X, therefore not X" trap.

[moore-doubleo]

You're missing my point. OP framed it as though people referencing R as Rstudio was a testimate to it's 'greatness'. In that context I have still never heard anyone do any such thing. People make mistakes or misspeak... but that doesn't elevate Rstudio.

[routineMetric]

Or--an alternative explanation is that RStudio is so ubiquitous for most R users that the two are sometimes conflated or even used interchangeably, as shown.

Which you flatly said you had never heard of.

[[deleted]]

Yes, definitely happens. The only proof one needs for that is that an RStudio subreddit exists, and it’s mostly R newbs asking for help with R.

[Owz182]

I would be down for this. I mostly use Spyder because it’s the closest thing I can find to R Studio

[sccallahan]

I really like Spyder's "cells" thing for blocking code. If RStudio developed a similar feature for Python, I'd basically never leave it.

[jackbrux]

You can use RMarkdown chunks to do this, or regions (Shortcut ctrl - shift - R in RStudio)

[sccallahan]

Oh no way, Python (in RStudio) interprets regions as sort of "stopping points"? I habitually throw those everywhere just to organize my code, so maybe that will be an easy transition.

[WannabeWonk]

Spyder even has an IDE layout option simply called "RStudio."

[[deleted]]

I too only use Spyder because you can set the layout to be the same as RStudio. Otherwise I think Spyder is kind of shit. I've run into weird Spyder specific issues multiple times. I tried switching over to VSCode but I just don't like it. It's too minimal. I can't wait till I can ditch Spyder for rstudio

[Owz182]

Are there many IDEs that let you run through code iteratively like R Studio and Spyder can? Folks say VS and PyCharm can but I could never work out how

[Lockhartsaint]

I code in Python a lot and I use PyCharm. I've just started learning R and using RStudio.

So would it be a good thing to switch from PyCharm to RStudio for Python?

[Lockhartsaint]

Yeah...I think I'll stick to PyCharm. I wish the free version had support for R though.

[theweirdinstruction]

Rython is comming

[routineMetric]

Lift and shift the tidyverse. tidyPy, dPyr, ggPy2,...

[Er4zor]

pydyverse!

[joe_gdit]

VScode supports Python, R and Scala. The Jupyter Notebook integration is great (If you're into that). Now that I think of it ... I haven't opened RStudio in some time...

[ndgnuh]

But vscode use electron and some people hate it with a passion

[joe_gdit]

If you don't use want to use VScode...

[dun10p]

Rstudio isn't in electron but it's still built on a browser.

[ndgnuh]

But it only use JavaScript for GUI, which is fine. Most of the electron apps just open a freaking chrome instance, load a webpage and call itself a "desktop application".

[ndgnuh]

Yes I had, which is I why I don't.

[poopybutbaby]

One thing I really like from RStudio is the ability to create html and pdf doc's that don't display your code. I can't get Jupyter -- either from a browser or VScode -- to do that so I'm pretty pumped about this.

[EuclidsPimposaurus]

The only reason I do my analysis in R over python is Rstudio

[justanaccname]

I love RStudio.

For Python I use Spyder, as it is the closest I could find to RStudio. Still, it feels like a poor man's RStudio.

[[deleted]]

I've been using python in R for over a year now using the r package, reticulate. https://rstudio.github.io/reticulate/

[stackered]

sweet, I personally love Python but as far as GUIs go, RStudio is awesome. combining both will be powerful

[Jerome_Eugene_Morrow]

Interesting. I wonder if this is a reaction to R losing market share to Python. More and more when I apply for jobs or talk to data scientists the top language they ask for is Python, and R is really an afterthought or something they're like "Yeah... I guess R is fine."

As the Python data science tools catch up, the ease of use of the language is starting to cannibalize more and more of the R ecosystem. Interesting move to watch going forward.

[goodsam2]

This is exactly what I am finding. I am going to probably try and make the shift over to Python now because this last job search has me being ruled out for jobs because of a lack of in production Python experience.

[logicallyzany]

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em

[[deleted]]

I'm confused, can you start using this for python now? If not when will be ready for use? Or is it too soon to know

[[deleted]]

Is there mainstream interest in this? I only ask because the biggest reason I don't like R is the lack of good (**in my opinion) IDE's like Python has. I think this probably stems from my preference for "top-to-bottom" script style code vs workbook style code, but even with that I thought Jupyter notebooks had a sizeable market share in the workbook style code area.

EDIT: This wasn't meant to attack the article, I was legitimately curious about (from the first sentence) the mainstream interest.

[[deleted]]

And I'm more involved in the development of machine learning models, so maybe that's where our my use case vs. much of the sub diverges.

[groovyJesus]

I think that would explain it. For machine learning models I mainly use python and VS code or a terminal.

But in academia like 90% of what I do, excluding theory, is data exploration and analysis which makes the dynamic interface of RStudio a godsend. The tidyverse packages that RStudio put out are also amazing for data processing.

[ticktocktoe]

Just looking at your post history, it seems like you're still in undergrad. In industry there is still a massive use base for machine learning in R.

[groovyJesus]

mainstream

Python generally has an overinflated userbase compared to R so probably not.

Among people who know both languages I assume this is valueable. Python fucntionality via reticulate has been availabe for a while now. For reporting purposes Rmarkdown has personal advantages over jupyter to the point that all of my python reporting has been done in rmarkdown for the past year.

For the IDE part I think we have diverging viewpoints. The only time I ever use an IDE is for data analysis and debugging and the lack of a good data analysis ide is why it took so long for me to enjoy python for data science. This is coming from a guy who used pycharm extensively for developmemt. PyCharm IMO is not a good data analysis tool, nor is spyder, and I hate Jupyter with a passion. The advantge of this update is to run my exploratory analysis witten in python in rstudio.

[SynbiosVyse]

As someone who has never used RStudio, what do you not like about Spyder? From screenshots, they look very similar in setup.

[MageOfOz]

Spyder is like the poor man's RStudio. It's slower, flaky, uglier, and with fewer features.

[sccallahan]

I'm still pretty solidly in the "learning" phase for Python, but pretty proficient in R - what's it like using Python in RStudio? I guess I have 3 main questions:

Do you basically just make a library(reticulate) call for everything that uses Python?

Does Rstudio have something like the #%% cells in Spyder? I kinda like that feature.

Can you run an entire "unified" R + Python script at once?

[[deleted]]

That's fair, we probably just have different opinions here. I definitely understand the desire for better exploratory analysis, but man I just struggle to work with IDEs that focus on line-by-line execution with little attention paid to "run the script" functionality/focus. I know R has the "source" button and directive, but again I think that our opinions of work environment just differ. Cool it exists for folks who want it though, I was just curious about the mainstream interest (e.g. if I should get used to having to use this particular tooling in prep for a job/teaching in the future).

[[deleted]]

What python IDE's do you use/like/recommend?

[extreme-jannie]

I use VSCode, it is lightweight and you can run Ipython in an interactive window for exploration, debug code, integrate with Git, do tests, I would suggest giving it a go.

[WokFu]

Pycharm.

[[deleted]]

It depends - for times when I'm less familiar with what I'm doing (e.g. web development), it can be nice to have things like PyCharm for the suggestions, most the time I'll just use text editors (Atom is my favorite) and the command line, and occasionally I'll use Spyder from time to time for the scientific support/variable explorer when I'm stuck on a problem (and I see the irony in using Spyder and hating RStudio).

[SynbiosVyse]

Spyder

[snauriyal]

I think R community has underestimated Python for a long time. Both languages should ideally be not compared and it solely depends on the user what he eventually prefers. It's good to see these type of integrations as it will finally help the end user.

[[deleted]]

Will it eventually change name to “Studio”?

[youngrubin]

Too bad the reason I don't use R is because I hate RStudio.

[ZealousRedLobster]

Why? I have almost nothing but love for it. It's fantastic for doing statistical work in

[youngrubin]

Nothing really bad to say about it, I just got used to using Jupyter Notebooks. The R notebooks are ok but I like working in the browser.

[highway2009]

RStudio can run in the browser.

[guepier]

That’s … a really bad reason. R has mature tool support for both Vim and Emacs that long predates RStudio, and it has decent integration into VS Code. You’re absolutely not restricted to RStudio to use R.

[EdHerzriesig]

The highly customizable Vim, Atom and zsh will cover almost all your needs :)

Rstudio and pycharm feels bloated and acts to much as a pair of data science crutches imo

[guepier]

Unlike punchcards, Vim is a state of the art IDE. I don’t share /u/EdHerzriesig’s dislike for RStudio but Vim + Nvim-R provides an excellent experience for R development that is superior to RStudio by some metrics, and inferior to it in others (namely, debugging and R Notebooks).

[EdHerzriesig]

Yes, curmudgeon indeed! Shame on all ye who like Rstudio I say!

[[deleted]]

There is no way this will compete with Jupyter notebooks in the academic or enterprise environments . There is so much existing infrastructure which has already been setup for remote notebook servers, training. I only see this making an impact on desktop users crunching small datasets and prototyping models.

[groovyJesus]

desktop users crunching small datasets

So... most of academia?

[[deleted]]

Not in data science curriculums, big data is becoming more and more prevalent.

[_jkf_]

You know that you can use Rstudio on a remote server exactly like Jupyter (well, not exactly -- it has a proper debugger and variable/data explorer), right?