[rrjjww]

As someone who learned most of my initial coding abilities through R and RStudio in a data science context, and since moved on to more “standard” languages and IDEs, I’ve yet to find anything that comes close to the flexibility and integration of RStudio for hacking together data analytics.

VS Code/Python has made some major improvements in the past couple years but it’s still very clunky compared to the ease of running R code line by line without having to start up a debug instance. And now with copilot the most frustrating parts of R (such as remembering all the Tidyverse syntax) have been abstracted away.

[qudat]

My partner does a lot of biostats in RStudio and I really think it breds terrible habits. Instead of categorizing code by files, everything is shoved into massive files. Instead of running a file top-to-bottom, code is run out-of-order which makes the code organization and flow of a program a complete disaster.

There is something to be said about running and processing large CSVs and keeping that in memory while running other parts of the program as well as having clickable access to all the dataframes loaded into memory.

[mjhay]

There's nothing about RStudio that encourages big single files or writing huge unstructured scripts. RStudio is a pretty good IDE, and R is a highly expressive functional-first [0] language. R was heavily influenced by Scheme, and has its own powerful metaprogramming [1] system - which is used to great effect in Tidyverse[2] libraries to make APIs that are nicer and convenient than anything reasonably practical in Python.

The problem with a lot of end-user R code is that it is written by statisticians, not programmers. They'd write the same garbage and huge scripts in Python (trust me, I know).

[0] http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Functional-programming.html

[1] https://adv-r.hadley.nz/metaprogramming.html

[2] https://www.tidyverse.org/

[ellisv]

> Instead of categorizing code by files, everything is shoved into massive files.

That's not really RStudio's fault. It is just how many people use R and were taught.

> code is run out-of-order which makes the code organization and flow of a program a complete disaster.

In my experience, with R Markdown, this is untrue. I see Jupyter Notebooks with cells run out of order much more often.

[cjk2]

This is the defacto standard way of operating it I understand, which is mostly just hacking at stuff in small chunks until it sort of works and leaving comments throughout it with "run this bit on Tuesdays only".

I recently had to inherit someone's R stuff and I had to learn R and fix it all. It now runs from a makefile repeatably.

Anyway it could be worse. It could be Minitab.

[bachmeier]

> Instead of running a file top-to-bottom, code is run out-of-order which makes the code organization and flow of a program a complete disaster.

That's more a REPL issue than specific to a particular language. It's the tradeoff you make. I write my R programs in Geany and then run the whole thing using Rscript. That gives me a clean environment on every run.

[goosedragons]

Emacs + ESS? Way more flexible. Maybe less integration because many of the big R package devs work for Posit. RStudio has a lot of superfluous junk in the UI I just don't need or care about.

[kqr]

I've used ESS for the past few years and recently tried using RStudio when I'm on Windows. For my purposes, which is just a little industrial statistics on the side, they are remarkably similar. I feel right at home in either!

[ubiquitination]

I agree - I teach statistics at a University and there is really no alternative to Rstudio for working with R. This is especially true considering that the vast majority of folk using R (in my field) have no prior programming experience. Downloading R, Vscode, downloading some R plugin, getting them to talk to each other, and only then starting to learn R - isn't very straightforward. It's also remarkably consistent on different operating systems - something to consider when half the students are on windows, half on macos...

[bachmeier]

RStudio Server on a Digital Ocean instance made my life a lot easier. Students fire up a browser, log in, and they're using R with all the packages. It was horrible when students ran R on their own machines back in the old days. Most of the questions I got were tech support rather than related to the material. And these days it has good Python support too.

[silveraxe93]

This works out of the box in VSCode?

Just open a .py file, then select the snippet of code you want to run and cmd+enter

It will open a new REPL for you (using your selected interpreter) the first time, and after that all commands are run in that same one.

[wodenokoto]

RStudio is just way better at choosing what code to send (if you only send the line the cursor rests on you’re gonna have a bad time. VSCode is a bit better than that but not great. Also, where does your plots get drawn when you use this? RStudio just works in this regards)

[RobinL]

It looks like, as far as I can tell, VS Code doesn't support the interactive window for working in R, which was a bit of a surprise to me when i looked it up.

The python interactive window has pretty much fully replaced my use of jupyter, since it gives you notebook-style output without the annoyance of the notebook format. My usual workflow is highlighting lines of code and shift-enter to execute (there's also a cells syntax).

I'm surprised by this because it _is_ possible to use R in Jupyter (although I never really liked the experience, R Studio was far superior).

[yabbs]

?

Yes it does.

[ivansavz]

An alternative in the Python world that is definitely worth looking into is the JupyterLab Desktop app, which is a standalone installer that is cross-platform and works great for beginners (no command line needed): https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-desktop?tab=readme-...

See my other comment in the main thread with more info.

[lylejantzi3rd]

> I’ve yet to find anything that comes close to the flexibility and integration of RStudio for hacking together data analytics.

Is there a good demo or video you can point to that shows this? I have no experience with R, RStudio, or data science, but you've piqued my interest.

[ellisv]

Any of David Robinson's (or anyone else's) Tidy Tuesday videos.

https://www.youtube.com/@safe4democracy/featured

[jurimasa]

If you work with Python, Spyder comes really, really close and is way better than jupyter

[Kalanos]

jupyter

[dcreater]

Jupiter (ipynb) notebooks in vs code.

[jakupovic]

cat, grep, sort and awk come pretty close :)

[dcchuck]

Came here to share that same experience. RStudio truly made me feel "close" to the data.