Comment by k310
18 hours ago
Formerly RStudio
> RStudio (now Posit) was founded in 2009 with the vision of creating high quality open-source software for data scientists. We’ve grown exponentially over time but our culture remains unchanged. We invest heavily in open-source development, education, and the community with the goal of serving knowledge creators 100 years from now.
> We want Posit to serve a meaningful public purpose and we run the company for the benefit of our customers, employees, and the community at large. That’s why we’re designated as a Public Benefit Corporation. As a Certified B Corp, we must meet the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. Our directors and officers have a fiduciary responsibility to address social, economic, and environmental needs while still overseeing our business goals.
So the main news is that they're giving up on develping an independent IDE and turning into another VS code fork. The loss of biodiversity and reliance on a no-so-reliable steward is mildly concerning.
They (reps? devs? I don't remember) have recently mentioned that they won't give up on RStudio, that it will stay separate from Positron. I really hope that stays true.
OTOH, posit funds a lot of development of important packages in the tidyverse and does a lot of community work etc.
So if maintaining RStudio is so much of a burden that it impedes the rest of their work, I don't think it's a bad idea to reduce the amount of work spent trying to compete with VSCode when that's an increasingly tough sell.
I'm not a fan of VSCode personally, but would probably be happy with a tmux setup with a console for R and some minimal output viewer, so people like me should be able to cobble something together that's a workable alternative to Posit.
> so people like me should be able to cobble something together that's a workable alternative to Posit.
There is Rkward[1], available from the repositories in many linux distributions.
Discovered it recently, because I'm currently learning R, and few linux distributions outside the Mandriva family offer Rstudio straight from the repositories, and I'm lazy to download and do a manual install every time.
[1] https://rkward.kde.org/
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It feels like when Opera dropped its own web engine, Presto, to become just another Chrome clone.
I'm not sure. wording like this:
> We anticipate many RStudio users will be curious about Positron.
Heavily implies it as a seperate thing that will continue to be maintained. They haven't said they're getting rid of support for Rstudio.
I think this is probably more that Posit have been trying to move more and more into the Python space, since that's where most data science is happenening. Rstudio has a great but is obviously very associated with R, so making a similarly intended project that is more explicit is supporting other languages isn't inherently a bad shout.
It will continue to be maintained, but if lots of R people move to Positron then RStudio's features will start to lag, and they'll eventually deprecate it.
Unless this has recently changed, the support for LLM coding tools in RStudio is so bare bones that I would expect many users to switch to Positron just for that.
I sent this to an R friend, and he was like, "yeah, it's been changed for a few years now". Is he missing something or has there been a major version or something?
May be mixing-up the company change with the IDE: Posit, the company, was named a few years ago, whereas Positron, the IDE, is new.
The IDE has been available for awhile.
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Not true.
But the community can maintain it.
The Rstudio users can give a roadmap and ask for help.