Thread by @gshotwell

Here's why #rstats users should be happy about Rstudio changing its name to Posit. 🧵

1⃣ It's easier to sell Posit products to your organization. Even though Rstudio Teams is a really good development ecosystem for Python work, it's very hard to express that because Rstudio's brand association is mostly R.

As a result it's going to be easier for R users to justify purchasing the products because it becomes a lot clearer that its not an investment in a particular technology.

2⃣ It's going to make R better. Major advances in R are going to come from cross-language projects like Arrow. RStudio is one of the best places to foster those initiatives, and having more Python and Julia customers helps with funding and motivating those those initiatives.

3⃣ It's going to make Python better. I don't really use Python, but that's mostly because I don't find it to be a productive language. It's missing a lot of the tools I like, and I find the developer experience much worse (hello dependencies)

A big part of this is that there's not really an organization that can provide sustained funding of user-friendly Python data science libraries.

If Posit can succeed in selling into more Python orgs, they can hire more open source developers to provide the same kind of long-term development of those libraries.

This will make it easier to be an R user at most organizations because your R knowledge will be more applicable to Python codebases and it'll be easier to get involved in those codebases

For example there's a team at Socure with a perfect Shiny use-case, but no R developers. I can probably help them get started using Shiny-for-Python, even though I can't really help them with something like Streamlit.

4⃣ It'll speed up adoption of #julialang. Julia has (IMO) the best fundamentals for data science work, but as a relatively new language it needs better tooling and infrastructure. I bet you're going to see much better Julia-R interoperability over the next year.