Robservable: Use of Observable notebooks (or parts of them) as htmlwidgets in R

juba.github.io

53 points·sebg··7 comments

I have to admit that R's dashboard and interactive visualisation ecosystem beats Python's. Plotly and Leaflet have R versions and Shiny blows Dash out of the water.

That's because R's core purpose is reproducible analysis and visualization. Sure, there are frameworks for ML (tidymodels) and API building (plumber) but those are either recent or not as good as in other languages. But just as Wes McKinney took R's dataframe type to create Python pandas, the Python community will eventually catch up on Viz as well.

R, RStudio, and Shiny are great for prototyping, but you'd regret building a production data science ecosystem around them. Better to start with Python and rely on JavaScript viz tools in the end.

5 years in. No regret so far. How long before you had regrets?

Oh, long before that.

In addition to being a language that does almost nothing to encourage good development practices and discourage bad ones, compared to Python the R ecosystem's tooling is just so inferior in every area: IDE, unit/functional testing, ETL, deployment, dependency management, etc. etc.

I agree completely. We made a dashboard in Shiny which was initially really quick and easy to make, but now several years later I've spent so many hours cursing the thing. All new dashboards are now made in python.

Altair + vega-lite make a nice foundation for better charts in Python. The interactivity features are great. Hope they catch on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com