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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

Promising idea.

It's worth noting that, in RStudio + RMarkdown, you can already mix different languages in chunks.

But for those who would rather not work in RStudio, maybe this will be appealing.

Hi there, member of Quarto team here. Quarto is actually being created by the same core group that created R Markdown. It's essentially the same idea but implemented in a cross-language fashion. I should also note that it is designed to be highly compatible w/ existing formats (you can render nearly all R Markdown documents as well as Jupyter Notebooks unmodified w/ Quarto).

This is all great. It's high time we supplemented Jupyter with a plain text language-agnostic format. Jupyter is a nice notebook but falls short of an effective format for shareable, reproducible, collaborative research.

Have you looked at jupyter-book?

The "native" format is MyST, which is markdown with extra things added in to customize behaviour of code blocks: https://jupyterbook.org/reference/cheatsheet.html

I've been writing some stuff in MyST and I found it very productive. The ability to also support jupyter notebooks is also interesting.

Thanks for developing this wonderful tool. Just tried it. The HTML output looks great.

I use R Markdown extensively. I am wondering if R Markdown is retiring? Should I begin to switch to Quarto? And is there a way to change the default code font to ligatures fonts (for example Fira Code)?

Quarto is the next generation of R Markdown, so over time it will surpass R Markdown in features/capability (I think in most areas it already has). Note that Quarto will read and render existing Rmd files without modification, so when you decide to switch isn't a terribly big deal. You can use the monofont option to specify an alternate code font.

So is the main difference instead of using the R markdown package to compile a PDF or whatever you use a standalone tool? I'm not quite sure what cross-language means here I guess. Does Quarto also offer more beyond what R markdown does in functionality? A quick glance at your site didn't show anything but I didn't look too hard TBH.

The idea is that we've separated running computations into pluggable "engines" (whereas in R Markdown everything was hard-coded to use R/Knitr). In Quarto we can use Knitr, or Jupyter, or Observable JS (and can add additional engines in the future). R Markdown was a tool created exclusively for R users whereas Quarto is for users of any language that want to create reproducible documents with Pandoc/markdown.

That's cool. I'm a heavy R user and was like ???. RMarkdown is a game changer. Thanks for doing that and this.

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