> R Notebooks can only be created and edited in RStudio
Luckily, this is wrong. Since R Notebooks are simply R Markdown, they can be edited with any 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.
Fair counterpoint, although when I wrote that I was more referring to the HTML knitting (via knitr). Also, there's a few very-new VS Code plugins for R Markdown which look very very interesting. (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=neuron.n...)
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”.
But its still much better experience to use RStudio markdown than Jupyter for me.
> The Python session ends after the cell executes, making it unhelpful for tasks other than ad hoc scripts.
This isn't the case anymore thanks to the reticulate library.
https://blog.rstudio.com/2018/03/26/reticulate-r-interface-t...
reticulate isn't native to R Studio yet (it's in the insider build), but will be interesting to see what happens with adoption then.
That said, for new users, I think R Notebooks are less daunting than Emacs + org-mode.
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.
Mathematica’s notebook interface in turn was almost certainly also inspired (directly or indirectly) by WEB, given that this was the first literate programming tool ever created.
Previously used R notebooks exclusively for all the benefits author mentioned.
* Write-only language ensures your ideas are difficult to steal
