RStudio is an integrated development environment for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. It is available in two formats: RStudio Desktop is a regular desktop application while RStudio Server runs on a remote server and allows accessing RStudio using a web browser. The RStudio IDE is a product of Posit PBC (formerly RStudio PBC, formerly RStudio Inc.).

Reproducible analyses with R Markdown vignettes

A strength of RStudio is its support for reproducible analyses with R Markdown vignettes. These allow users to mix text with code in R, Python, Julia, shell scripts, SQL, Stan, JavaScript, C, C++, Fortran, and others,[5] similar to Jupyter Notebooks. R Markdown can be used to create dynamic reports that are automatically updated when new data become available with the results exported various formats, including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and LaTeX, with templates specific to the requirements of many scientific journals.[6] Xie (2023) describes how to use it to write books.

Reproducibility is key to science,[7] but it is not easy to obtain. In a 2016 survey of over 1,500 scientists, 52% agreed that there was "a significant crisis" in the reproducibility of scientific results. Another 38% said there was "a slight crisis"; 7% "didn't know", and only 3% said there was no crisis. Worse, "more than 70% of researchers had tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half had failed to reproduce their own experiments (emphasis added).[8] R Markdown vignettes and Jupyter notebooks make the data analysis completely reproducible. R Markdown vignettes have been included as appendices with tutorials on Wikiversity.[9]

Licensing model

The RStudio integrated development environment (IDE) is available with the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. The AGPL v3 is an open source license that guarantees the freedom to share the code.

RStudio Desktop and RStudio Server are both available in free and fee-based (commercial) editions. OS support depends on the format/edition of the IDE. Prepackaged distributions of RStudio Desktop are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. RStudio Server and Server Pro run on Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat Linux, CentOS, openSUSE and SLES.[10]

Overview and history

The RStudio IDE is partly written in the C++ programming language and uses the Qt framework for its graphical user interface.[11] The bigger percentage of the code is written in Java. JavaScript is also used.[12]

Work on the RStudio IDE started around December 2010,[13] and the first public beta version (v0.92) was officially announced in February 2011.[1] Version 1.0 was released on 1 November 2016.[14] Version 1.1 was released on 9 October 2017.[15]

Addins

The RStudio IDE provides a mechanism for executing R functions interactively from within the IDE through the Addins menu.[16] This enables packages to include Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for increased accessibility. Popular R packages that use this feature include:

  • bookdown – a knitr extension to create books
  • colourpicker – a graphical tool to pick colours for plots
  • datasets.load – a graphical tool to search and load datasets
  • googleAuthR – Authenticate with Google APIs

Development

The RStudio IDE is developed by Posit, PBC, a public-benefit corporation[17] founded by J. J. Allaire,[18] creator of the programming language ColdFusion. Posit has no formal connection to the R Foundation, a not-for-profit organization located in Vienna, Austria,[19] which is responsible for overseeing development of the R environment for statistical computing. Posit was formerly known as RStudio Inc. In July 2022, it announced that it changed its name to Posit, to signify its broadening exploration towards other programming languages such as Python.[20]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ a b "RStudio, new open-source IDE for R | RStudio Blog". Blog.rstudio.org. Archived from the original on 2015-01-24. Retrieved 2015-05-01.
  2. ^ "Release 2.8.2". 18 October 2017. Retrieved 26 October 2022.
  3. ^ "rstudio/rstudio". GitHub. RStudio. Archived from the original on 5 April 2019. Retrieved 18 December 2016.
  4. ^ Pylvainen, Ian (2016-03-24). "What license is RStudio available under? – RStudio". rstudio.com. Archived from the original on 2018-05-26. Retrieved 2018-05-25.
  5. ^ Xie et al. (2023, esp. sec. 2.7).
  6. ^ Xie, Allaire, and Grolemund (2023).
  7. ^ in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper wrote, "non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science." But a theory is "falsified only if we discover a reproducible effect which refutes the theory". Popper (1968, p. 86).
  8. ^ Baker (2016).
  9. ^ e.g., v:US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and v:Forecasting nuclear proliferation, accessed 5 January 2024. Many more examples are included in Xie, Dervieux, and Riederer (2023).
  10. ^ "RStudio". rstudio.com. Archived from the original on 30 October 2015. Retrieved 2 December 2016.
  11. ^ Verzani, John (23 September 2011). Getting Started with RStudio. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 4. ISBN 9781449309039.
  12. ^ "rstudio/rstudio". GitHub. Archived from the original on 2018-06-10. Retrieved 2018-09-13.
  13. ^ "portable download of java dependencies · rstudio/rstudio@484cb88 · GitHub". Github.com. 2010-12-07. Archived from the original on 2019-04-05. Retrieved 2015-05-01.
  14. ^ "Announcing RStudio v1.0!". RStudio Blog. 1 November 2016. Archived from the original on 30 June 2017. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  15. ^ "RStudio v1.1 Released". RStudio Blog. 9 October 2017. Archived from the original on 28 October 2021. Retrieved 23 December 2017.
  16. ^ "RStudio Addins". RStudio. Archived from the original on 2018-09-10. Retrieved 2018-09-16.
  17. ^ "Posit Benefit Corporation Annual Report". Archived from the original on 2023-01-19. Retrieved 2023-01-19.
  18. ^ "About". Posit.co. Archived from the original on 2022-11-02. Retrieved 2015-12-15.
  19. ^ ""Statutes of "The R Foundation for Statistical Computing""" (PDF). The R Foundation. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-04-03. Retrieved 2019-08-12.
  20. ^ "RStudio is becoming Posit". Posit.co. Archived from the original on 2022-11-02. Retrieved 2022-07-28.

External links