Potentially very exciting. The early builds a year or two ago that I tried were too buggy to replace R Studio, but a tight integration of good data tools, a good IDE, and modern AI coding assistants is going to be very powerful if posit nails this.
These guys' PR is trying too hard.
The source code looks very open.
This moving the goal posts of open-source to exclude anyone making money off of it is annoying. I can get the project for FREE and I can see the source code and make changes to it. How is it not open source? Because I can't also turn around and sell it?
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Limitations
You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.
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What is annoying is companies redefining these terms for PR, especially when they end up confusing the newer generations among the crowd.
[1] https://opensource.org/osd
[2] https://github.com/posit-dev/positron?tab=License-1-ov-file#...
Just curious.
- core services (Positron's core language system is an API, and R and Python are extensions) - native panes (you can contribute webview panes but they're slow!) - toolbars for other panels, or global toolbars - modal dialogs or any UI other than notifications and quick-pick lists - custom layouts
At a higher level, Positron is a platform that contains data science tools for _other_ extensions to use, and doesn't make sense as an extension itself. The R and Python extensions are the first two we built, but the platform is extensible to other languages.
- discover all the interpreters on the system for the language (e.g. 'find me all the Pythons')
- start an interpreter session for the language
- run a fragment of code in the language and return the result
- get all the variables in the current interpreter session for the language
- view data defined in a particular variable
etc.
We generally try not to invent new protocols; in addition to LSP and DAP, we use Jupyter messages and kernels for most of the above. Positron only has custom protocols/APIs for the bits that are outside the purview of existing protocols.
Not trying to discredit the need for a fork though.
While you can technically do all of your examples (with extensions), it would likely mean that you'd have to either redesign the UX to limit it to where the extensions are good, or live with a somewhat unpolished user flow at times (because they're possible, but maybe not in the way the person imagining the UX wants.
I have a love/hate relationship with the VScode webview panels, but the message handler is not my favorite implementation in the world. I would love a way to send binary data, and get semantic token colors.
The only issue is that when you have a custom build of VScode, you have to manage a fork of VScode, and potentially pull in updates as VScode updates. How do you manage that?
(reference: Ju in Jupyter is Julia)
For your average data scientist or data analyst, though, it tends to look like a solution in search of a problem at best, and possibly just straight-up inscrutable. e.g., forget multiple dispatch, most my colleagues are already grumpy if they see @singledispatch in my code.
RMarkdown isn't going anywhere! Quarto exists to bring the RMarkdown experience that folks love to a broader set of users and contexts. It is true that we try to keep the .qmd experience in Quarto pretty close to the .rmd experience in RMarkdown, and it is true that Quarto does things that RMarkdown never will. But it's not the case that "RMarkdown is being phased out and replaced with Quarto".
I might be conflating rmarkdown with knitr because the developer of knitr (who was employed on some capacity by Posit) was let go.
For how long do you think Posit will continue to support both platforms?
The niches exist (overlapping niches aside), but agree with the skepticism since I also wonder whether the switching cost is worthwhile for many users
For reference I’m on a small Data Eng/analyst team.
Is there any plan or consideration for this to be implemented? It's a wildly important aspect of mine and many other RStudio user's analysis pipelines.
Out of curiosity, do you prefer source or visual mode when working with inline Quarto output?
You can follow the Positron feature request over here: https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/5640
Thanks for listing this feature request... It's pretty shocking to me to see that so many people don't use inline plots! I am particularly fond of them for ensuring that plot dimensions are correct so that I don't need to resize everything once I render a report and add it to my Quarto website.
From curiosity on my end - are inline plots a technically challenging problem? I have no idea if VSCode would enable something like this out of the box. :)
https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/3676
Inline plots are pretty challenging, especially in source mode since (so far) Positron mostly lets the Monaco editor surface do its thing. In visual mode, we've already got our own custom webview so there's an easier onramp.
I'm an academic bioinformatician/data scientist and I mostly use R to do my data visualization and table wrangling. I use quarto documents. Before positron I used RStudio as well as VSCode with lots of extensions to add R functionality there.
My main gripes with Positron are no inline plots underneath code chunks, and some bugs where sending code to the console from code chunks occasionally stops working until restarting the program, and View() occasionally stops working. But the better file explorer, integration with Claude Code, and access to most of my VSCode extensions make it worth it for me.
piskov•5mo ago
Dataspell is IDE.