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Comment by smortaz | Hacker News Reader

dear HN - my team at microsoft did the Python Tools for Visual Studio project (http://pytools.codeplex.com).

i would love to know if there is any interest in us providing an "R Tools for Visual Studio" product. think Project, Edit, intellisense, Debug, Deploy, linux debug, etc. support for R in VS.

if we did this, it would be a fork of PTVS (and free + open source of course).

thx!

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If you get it to run on Linux or OS X, there would be no shortage of buyers, including the company I work at. R is our primary toolset. I spend 4-5 hours per day in R studio, & it could certainly use some beefing up - handling large dataframes without borking, simple Charts button rather than the ggplot2 ceremony, tighter integration with hadoop... My workflow currently is - run a bunch of Scalding jobs to mapreduce few hundred GB on hadoop, then pull the results into R, deep dive analysis, some ML ( CART & the like ) to see if we can influence customer behavior & improve retention & conversion. If I could fire up R in Visual Studio & do all this, I'd definitely spring for it.

thx dxbydt. VS itself isnt xplat of course, but who knows where things will end up now that Azure is a big focus. note that VS does provide more & more linux support (eg PTVS does remote debug).

also chances are you wont have to spring for it as VS (community edition) is free :).

honest question and I really don't want to start a language war, I just want to understand more. Why do you use R when you can use Python? I tryed R and I hate it because for me it feels like something all patched together, without a principles behind. Is it like that for you as well but you need all those libraries or it's just me?

For me, productivity. For maintaining large projects or building applications, I'd absolutely go with Scala or Python, but I cannot be as productive in other languages. R has performance issues, but once you know it, you can avoid them (see the recent dplyr benchmarks ~2x faster than pandas).

thanks for the reply. I'm really not bothered with performance, at the end the difference is not that much anyway, what really horrify me is how is it programmed. I remember I wanted to do a statistical test and I could get back the sample size or the p-value calling the same function but with different arguments. I am not a programmer (learned doing my job) but that really disturbed me, even now, writing this. I guess it's just me, as it seems that R is getting more and more attention.

In my opinion the majority of code in R is extremely well suited to its domain. That means it does not look like the python code you are used to, and I'd recommend learning more about why R works the way it does, e.g. at http://adv-r.had.co.nz

What about "R Tools for Excel"? I worked on "R4Calc" 6 years ago (https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/R_and_Calc) and this project received over 25K downloads before it became inactive.

Having something as easy to use as Excel, with access to R's scripting language, would make my life immensely easier.

Rexcel? http://rcom.univie.ac.at/download.html

Yes, but native support in Excel for R would be much more interesting to me and certainly the businesses we sell to.

yes - i'd love to see native Python & R support in excel as well. they are aware that better scripting support is needed - they just need to hear it from more ppl to make it a priority. i'll point them at this thread meanwhile.

I read somewhere that VBA is replaced by javascript in office 2016, which comes out this summer.

Oh wow - I would be really interested in more about this!

Vote for python

I would make a separate blog post on it and post that here, or even just an Ask HN type post.

That said it sounds interesting, but I would love to hear how committed the team is to keeping these things alive. What VP is behind PTVS and willing to put their butt on the line for it? I think a lot of people might still have a bad taste in their mouth after IronRuby and IronPython got a lot of attention from MS and then languished and were abandoned for years. Let's not let that happen again please.

thx, tho i've had a hard time getting something to hit the front page to get enough data...

re PTVS/RTVS - the VP behind them is joseph sirosh. he's a huge Python & R fan & just gave us four more reqs to do more (where more == docker+linux+ipython/jupyter - ping if interested!).

re ironruby/ironpython - i hear you. tho note that ironpython at least is alive & well. PTVS itself supports all interpreters. our work is all open source so it helps a little.

Revolution's DevelopR is very similar to what you're describing--an IDE for R built on Visual Studio.

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/revolution-r-enterprise-d...

actually that was a fork of PTVS :). we'll look at adding more advanced editing, intellisense, visualization, debugging (cross-lang, cross-OS, ...), etc.

That would be pretty cool. Since I have the general feeling that the developer market and the "R programmer" market are pretty different groups, I'm not sure how much uptake there would be (plus, R Studio is pretty good). But I think it would be great to have a better IDE for R.

Yes!

Incidentally, I already have a feature request! :-)

As a heavy C++ user (also using R for EDA & analytics), one feature I love about PTVS is mixed-mode debugging: https://pytools.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Mixed-mode%20deb...

Any chance of that for "RTVS"? Preferably with cooperation with Rcpp, http://rcpp.org/

(There's some basic support for Rcpp in RStudio -- https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200486088-Usin... -- but it's rather limited.)

FYI, daily builds of RStudio now use libclang to provide way more C++ language support including autocomplete (but not, I believe, debugging). http://www.rstudio.org/download/daily

Debugging is partly waiting on lldb work for windows, which looks like has taken off recently.

Thanks, sounds interesting! BTW, out of curiosity, is there a way to track developments in RStudio like the one you've mentioned?

// Preview Release Notes make a note of "Code completion for C/C++", but don't mention libclang (use of which is interesting on its own, IMHO, since it better indicates the quality improvement to expect): http://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/preview-rel...

That would be fantastic, especially if it was easy to call into R from C# via for example RDotNet.

Absolutely. I work with C# all the time and I am now working on integrating R statistics and data mining into a SSAS cube product we are doing. Having more seamless integration between .NET, Visual Studio, and R would be amazing.

great! how about C/C++, eg mixed mode debugging from R <-> C the way PTVS does?

Yes please, I work for a big bank and we use VS for C# and F# and Rstudio and Notepad++ and RGui for R. Having one-ide-to-rule-them-all + supported by Microsoft would be a godsend for us.

Have you looked at the open source F# type provider for accessing R[1]? It's one way to use R from Visual Studio today.

[1] http://bluemountaincapital.github.io/FSharpRProvider/

Yes we've tried it, it's not as stable as plain vanilla R and it's not as powerful in terms of dev tools support (mostly productivity wise, might just be because we are used to them) as RStudio, Eclipse+StatET, Notepad++ w/custom language items.

I can't really comment on R, but thank you for a great toolkit that has really helped me at work. Being able to use VS to plug into a git server and write python code is lovely.

I may use the R equivalent if it existed, but I'm not terribly competent with R.

Please don't forget python for data science. Any chance we can get equivalent python integration and attention to azure and office stuff?

R studio is already a very mature IDE platform for R programming. What's more can you offer than R studio?

They can fold it into VS so that RStudio can be abandoned, and the premier development platform for R can be locked behind the MS paywall.

That's my concern as R studio is open source; VS is not! But anyway, I should applaud for this move of MS. It's a very smart move strategically. R usage is climbing the chart...

R-Studio is a wonderful IDE - kudos to their team. also, if we do this, it'll be free+oss like PTVS. VS itself isnt oss, but at least the pro/community edition is free now.

That would be fantastic! I love PTVS and I am confident you can make RTVS just as great.

Oh my yes! That would be amazing.

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