Addendum: Clearly the hive mind MS corporate drones are out in force today/tonight. I know everybody is enamoured with MS-Eclipse etc but R is best used unfiltered. Not hijacked into the laughable world of Windows and Visual Studio. I know from bitter experience that the Windows versions of R are terribly unstable by comparison with the Linux builds. I learned the latter precisely for that reason. MS is playing a fantastic marketing game but I was agnostic on platform until R on Windows started showing its catastrophic limitations. It's a second class citizen as soon as you venture beyond the basics. Take it from an ex R-on-Windows guy who uses R 10 hours per day.
Actually, no it's not.
One of R's strengths is its ability to manipulate data and then visualise the output. Doing this via the command line is slow and cumbersome. Do you plan to output a chart, save it, then open it with another application?
RStudio excels in not just being an IDE, but also a visual data representation tool. Write the R code, view the chart in the same application (Rstudio), tweak until happy, then save. It's a much smoother iterative process.
I'd be prepared to believe that perhaps a command line champion could manage libraries and develop code direct from the R interpreter, as well as I can using RStudio. However, I can't see how one could possibly produce the same quality data visualisation working directly at the command prompt.
I don't know about Visual Studio, I don't use it, but your criticism of RStudio is wide of the mark.
RStudio shines when it comes to viewing data, global variables, and command history. Personally, I found the editor itself to be far too restrictive so I switched back to emacs and the command line. Also, as far as I know there's no way to get a true dark theme in RStudio where the entire application is dark, not just the code.
Most importantly, if your workflow becomes IDE based, especially on graphics, then you will have a dearth of skills for implementing actual production code that does not rely on a local workstation running a local copy of the IDE in graphical environment. You'll be short of the understanding of how the plumbing works, limiting you to the exploration role of a single-user guy, and you'll limit the shareability of your work.
Sure, R-Studio is great. But no, it's not an absolute good. It's a tradeoff. Know what you're giving up. Personally, I like to use the most generic, widespread version of tools as possible. I can SSH into any computer anywhere and be running R within minutes, with full familiarity with the environment.
By the way, clearly I'm in the minority, and that's the problem. R itself is open source, but R-studio is not. Microsoft has clearly taken a view that they can buy a large part of the R ecosystem, by buying this tool. I consider this to be a bit of a hijack, and that is the last reason why I dislike R Studio -> it is a vector for undermining open source software and in this case, R itself as open to all. All of a sudden, a large (possibly majority) slice of the user base is beholden to a for-profit company and all its incentives. Not me.
Totally respect having a focused command line w no frills workflow. To each their own.
But you should really give RStudio a try. It's a beautiful, highly productive R IDE with many features that make writing R much much more pleasant.
BTW RTVS was built by the same group that made PTVS (Python Tools for VS) and NTVS (Node.js Tools for VS). RTVS will also be free & open source of course.
Cheers
Ten years ago I would have never thought I'd say this, but I am really liking Microsoft these days. Great work!
(here's the repo: https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS)
In other words, why would an Rstudio user consider a switch to RTVS?
* Multi-lingual: projects w C#, Python, SQL, etc.
* Multi-line repl: recall/edit/submit chunks of code
* Lots of add-ins: like 6,000 (hopefully a few are useful for R!)
* Upcoming integration w Excel, Azure ML, SQL, etc.
* etc.
If you are already a VS user, checking out RTVS is a no brainer.
But in summary, RStudio is better :). Hopefully we'll have some key differentiation features in upcoming releases.
PTVS is fantastic, I'm glad to see it carried on.
http://adv-r.had.co.nz - Advanced R by Hadley Wickham
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/r/
I keep my links on Github: https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages/blob/master/r.o...
https://www.coursera.org/learn/r-programming (free to audit)
https://code.visualstudio.com/
It has great support for js, node, go, .net etc. already. We'll hopefully add Python & R support soon.
And I usually work from Linux, so it will be in a VM. But I'll try :)
Speaking of a web page, our team also did "Jupyter notebooks as a Service" on Azure ML. You can fire up a notebook quickly and code away - essentially like tmpnb if you've used it, but your notebook is persisted.
we'll be adding more languages soon. Try one of the samples at: (no login), or start w blank notebook in the Azure ML Studio:
https://gallery.cortanaanalytics.com/browse/?categories=[%22...
Is it easy to connect these to local data sources or do I have to upload csv's or something similar? Being a bank we store data locally in both PostgreSQL and MS SQL, although we are considering moving some stuff to Azure anyway. Just have to clear it with the legal guys!
I guess I can make a quick export of non personified data for testing though.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/vir...
edit: see gnoway's comment below tho.
If so, the good news is that you can do that with RTVS, thanks to the R SDK. Basically you create models locally, test/debug them, then zap that onto Azure ML's backend. The SDK itself isn't tied to RTVS in any way. You can use it from RStudio, Jupyter/R, vim, ... if you like.
R SDK: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/AzureML/index.html
Regarding your 2nd question - RTVS/SQL integration - yes, that's definitely coming too. For this initial release we just wanted to make sure we got the core IDE functionality right...
Kind of like SQL Server Integration Services but instead of SQL Server, target Azure ML.
One thing I'm missing from my workflow would be a way to integrate in to an IDE so I just push a button, and it'll commit the code to a gist, and push the output to a OneNote for other people to comment on. I'm wondering if it would be possible to fork this, and tweak the calls to knitr so they use my library instead.
There's a significant mindshare in Linux and Open Source. That being said, I don't understand why MS didn't provide Visual Studio, Office, and similar for Linux at a premium. For example, if Office was $499 for Windows, charge $999 for Linux. That way, they get the best of both worlds (use their software, pay them money). And their mindshare is significant as well, and this would increase it.
Maybe finally they are coming to their senses, doing just this. It's about time.
* = I suspect the reason behind not creating Office for Linux desktop is that: non-Android Linux desktops have too little market share to be worth the engineering effort / risk of cannibalizing Windows desktop sales. Whereas Android has huge market share and people were perfectly comfortably using Android even without Office. So in that narrow case it made sense to go where the users are.
And they can say that on Linux desktops, you can use a very compatible version of Office inside a browser.
