alt Hacker NewsThe article makes out like auto completion and help on hover are new things, but RStudio IDE has had them for years and years.
R/RStudio was my first language/IDE. I was horribly shocked when moving into other languages to discover they didn't have things you got out of the box with R/RStudio. "You mean I have to look up documentation for a function/method!?! - that's supposed to be automatic!".
R has a bunch of features which other languages lack to the degree that it's a rude shock to learn that other ecosystems lack them. One is the REPL with extremely convenient RStudio keyboard shortcuts to run lines of code (to achieve similar with ruby, I have an elaborate neovim/slime setup that took hours to configure and still isn't as good as RStudio gives out of the box).
A sign of a brilliant tool is when an idiot can get more done with it than an expert can with alternatives.
Maybe that explains why I was confused about this article. I kept wondering what exactly on offer, and that it couldn't be as simple as help on hover and auto-complete, because those seemed pretty basic and prevalent. It took me a few years to move to RStudio, but at this point, I literally don't know anyone who doesn't use it. To the point that I once had to explain to a labmate that R and RStudio were, in fact, not the same thing.
So either this is not that exciting, or else the additional things that are on offer are not very clearly explained to the point that I missed them.