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The R community has built an incredible competing tool in RStudio and RMarkdown. You could argue that the progress of Jupyter is being held back by its ties to
by localhost 7y ago
The R community has built an incredible competing tool in RStudio and RMarkdown. You could argue that the progress of Jupyter is being held back by its ties to JSON as the serialization format for notebooks (which enables, among other things, the ability to serialize notebook execution output into the .ipynb vs. RMarkdown which does not).
So the fairer comparison would be to compare .rmd vs. .ipynb instead of looking at the kernelspecs in .ipynbs to see the distribution of R users. In my experience (I own the Azure Notebooks service at Microsoft), I see very little R usage - in the order of 1% of Python, similar to what other commenters on this thread have seen.
- claytonjy 7y agoCan you imagine how much headache would have been saved if Jupyter was basically Rmarkdown with a less R-specific extension and a more general backend? After years with R I've been doing a lot of python work lately and UGH it feel like JupyterLab is a decade behind Rmarkdown. We wouldn't need special viewers in our source control frontend, or git hooks + tools like jupytext, or in-between editor plugins (VSCode)! By not storing state with input and forcing top-to-bottom linear runs, I think the entire field of machine learning would be significantly more reproducible than it is now.
- localhost 7y agoI totally agree with your sentiment. However, I also think that the popularity of Jupyter is largely due to the fact that it does appeal to a certain type of user. I do believe that we have room for more than one option. The work that we've done in interactive programming in the Python VS Code extension is one possible approach that folks have seemed to like, and that aligns with what you're saying. We're going to continue to explore that direction in addition to the Jupyter work that we're doing. Stay tuned!