Advantages of Using R Notebooks Instead of Jupyter Notebooks (2017)

The article claims that<p>&gt; <i>R Notebooks can only be created and edited in RStudio</i><p>Luckily, this is <i>wrong</i>. Since R Notebooks are simply R Markdown, they can be edited with <i>any</i> editor (although the integration is obviously lost). This is, in fact, one of its decisive advantages over Jupyter Notebooks: most of the other issues mentioned in the article are solvable, whereas this issue fundamentally isn’t.

It’s just that RStudio’s vim support is so extremely bad, compared to VSCode or even the Jupyter Notebook vim plug-in. I guess this won’t bother you if you don’t have a developer background, but I find that editing code in RStudio is a real pain.<p>I wish I could use RStudio with the exact same keybindings and vim behavior as Jupyter in the browser. That alone would make things bearable. Like the exact same keys for cell execution, adding new cells, etc. Call it “Jupyter mode”.

RE python in Rmarkdown being limited...<p>&gt; The Python session ends after the cell executes, making it unhelpful for tasks other than ad hoc scripts.<p>This isn&#x27;t the case anymore thanks to the reticulate library.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.rstudio.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;26&#x2F;reticulate-r-interface-to-python&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.rstudio.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;26&#x2F;reticulate-r-interface-t...</a>

R notebooks behave similarly to org-mode, albeit with fewer supported languages and a few less options for controlling execution and value passing between code blocks. Org-mode is the oldest and most powerful environment of this sort that I know of.<p>That said, for new users, I think R Notebooks are less daunting than Emacs + org-mode.<p>Like most things associated with RStudio and the Tidyverse, I feel that they’ve really done their homework. Even if org-mode does more, I feel it’s pretty evident that R Notebooks at least made an effort to understand org-mode’s prior art.

A really good article on notebooks is the blog post by Yihui Xie - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yihui.name&#x2F;en&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;notebook-war&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yihui.name&#x2F;en&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;notebook-war&#x2F;</a>.

I’ve moved to Orgmode Babel for all my notebook needs. Work straight out of emacs, exports to many formats, literate programming, supports dozens of languages.<p>Previously used R notebooks exclusively for all the benefits author mentioned.

Primary disadvantage of using R Notebooks Instead of Jupyter Notebooks: Writing R instead of numpy &#x2F; pandas python.

Previous discussion from a year ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14522795" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14522795</a> (70 comments)

Does anyone know why the ipython developers rejected solutions in which version control diffs were readable?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atom.io&#x2F;packages&#x2F;hydrogen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atom.io&#x2F;packages&#x2F;hydrogen</a> + git is a decent way to get jupyter interactivity and an easy to apply version control on a plain python file

Working in RMarkdown it is super-easy to generate a publishable document from your research. Whereas there is still no good Jupyter—&gt;PDF solution.

Bit of a typo in the title. Original: <i>Advantages of Using R Notebooks For</i> Data Analysis <i>Instead of Jupyter Notebooks</i>

* You get enjoy a language with incompatible interfaces for every single data structure.<p>* Write-only language ensures your ideas are difficult to steal