When I first started coding, I was mostly using Visual Basic for Application (VBA) to automate painfully repetitive data cleaning tasks in MS Excel.
This eventually evolved into building more sophisticated codebases (still in VBA), which then evolved to using R and Python as my main “go-to” coding languages.
So, for many years now, I’ve been flipping between R Studio and VS Code fairly regularly to build whatever codebase I’m tinkering away at.
The Great Divide
If you’re an R user, or a Python user, you’ve probably come across the debate of which language is better at some point.
It was a pretty heated debate for quite a number of years, but in the end, there still isn’t really a clear winner, in my opinion.
It all depends on what you’re trying to do.
Want to quickly do some data munging and make some nice plots?
Reach for R / R Studio.
Want to build an ML model or do some kind of web-scraping?
Reach for Python / VS Code.
Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and so you basically have always just had to consider your use-case, pick one, and then you’re usually golden from there.
When Two Become One
I’ve been a big fan of R Studio ever since it came out.
One of the features I’ve always enjoyed most is that you could easily “see the data”, and almost equally easily, visualize it, all within the comfort of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
You never really had to leave it. Which I love.
With VS Code, I’ve always been a bit frustrated by how many extensions I had to add on to the IDE to achieve anything even remotely similar, and the experience has always been kind of buggy, and never seamless.
I’ve always wished that there was some way to basically have R Studio, inside of VS Code, while retaining all the handy features of VS Code.
There’s actually quite a few people out there who’ve tried to do this in various hacky ways.
So, imagine my surprise when I’m flipping through my Twitter feed1, and I see that the good folks at Posit have essentially made this dream come true.
Enter, Positron
At the time of writing this post, Positron is still actively being developed with some beta releases out for people like me who like to tinker.
I’m actually typing this post up in the new Positron IDE, and my first impressions are extremely good!
Even if this software turns out to be buggy as hell2 in these beta stages, I don’t know if I’m ever going back.
This. Is. Incredible.
A dream come true.
Thank you Posit!!
😊