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Not open source: “You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.”
While this is "based on" the open source codebase of VSCode, it's very much unclear from the project page which features and dependencies aren't open source or even free-as-in-beer (..and may require a paid subscription, enterprise plan purchase, premium account, etc).

I.e., where they are making money off of this.

One clear indication that there are strings attached is that they're bundling a specialized GenAI assistant with the IDE.

Wish it was made clear in the FAQ. It doesn't cover this at all.

Positron is also the name of an ultra-portable 3D printer

> https://www.positron3d.com/

that actually defined its whole new class of ultra-portable 3D printers (Positron-style 3D printers; their drive system is named "Positron drive").

A sibling of the Positron is the JourneyMaker:

> https://github.com/mcfazio2001/JourneyMaker-Positron

A cost-reduced (no CNC-machined parts) variant of the JourneyMaker with a unibody chassis that you can 3D-print by yourself is the Lemontron:

> https://lemontron.com/

Kind of unfortunate that it uses pyright and jedi instead of just basedpyright for the more advanced features. Python language support just isn't great with jedi compared to pylance or basedpyright.

And not to beat a dead horse, but I'm also not a huge fan of the broad claims around it being OSS when it very clearly has some strict limitations.

I've already had to migrate from R Connect Server / Posit Server at work, because of the extreme pricing for doing simple things like having auth enabled on internal apps.

We found a great alternative that's much better anyways, plus made our security folks a lot happier, but it was still a massive pain and frustrated users. I've avoided any commercial products from Posit since then and this one makes me hesitant especially with these blurry lines.

hard no for me WRT positron... i managed a university's jupyterhub deployments for a while and we had faculty CLAMORING for this vs. Rstudio.

the problem? the fact that you need a license to use. it's not OSS. you are not allowed to deploy this on a hosted/managed system:

``` Limitations

You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.

You may not move, change, disable, or circumvent the license key functionality in the software, and you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software that is protected by the license key.

You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices of the licensor in the software. Any use of the licensor's trademarks is subject to applicable law. ```

We're working on this! Education is really important to us so this is 100% a problem we want to solve.
Wow can't we escape the vscode fork black hole anymore right?
Emacs is the only truly next-generation data science IDE, and the last-generation one too.

(Hiding behind my couch after writing that)

What packages and workflow specifically do you use? I haven’t come across many gentle introductions so looking for clues on what’s a reasonable first step that’s well maintained with good docs.
This looks exactly like the Spyder IDE that comes with Anaconda and WinPython. You get. Code editor, repl, variable inspector, and inline charts. Everything you need.
The interesting thing to me is that another company is adopting the Elastic license.
I don't want to dunk too hard on this as it seems to be reasonably well made, but how are we making a data science IDE without a good SQL client? I might be biased but that's a major part of the workflow. You're already losing against PyCharm or Visual Studio (not code, the real one) simply because of that.

I appreciate that full IDEs are heavy tools, but when I just need an editor I go with vim, if I have to do real work why not take out the power tools?

Can this connect to WSL like VSCode?
I have been testing this IDE as I'm a heavy user of Rstudio.

On Linux it's slow and buggy unfortunately. It's improving though.

Great, another VS Code fork that could realistically just be an extension.
Gave me a heart attack that someone was posting my site overnight while I wasn't ready for launch :D...

But thanks for adrenaline spike. Now I can start my morning.

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Is VS Code/VSCodium becoming the Chromium of IDEs?
This tool and ecosystem does not support Julia. I would expect that at this stage a data science polyglot tool is not just R and Python. Not sure why they would not support Julia.
Julia never got traction, and now it's on decline.
I'm a daily user of R with R studio (academia) and also use Python in VS code. Tried posit a couple of months ago, but it wasn't stable as daily driver. Not all packages were there. Might have to try again soon.

I have different specific habits for R and Python. Think it'll take a bit of time for people like me to switch. For a week, I also tried R in VS code, but something wasn't feeling right. I excited for the connections-pane if it works smoothly

I have a project that I want to do something with - a JSON file with about 500k lines. I want to present the data in a clear way and struggling to find the right approach. Maybe an obvious answer to this, but I’m not a data scientist.
I think you can easily load JSON data into Pandas DataFrame. Then you can create visualizations and compute statistics. Python might be usefule for that.
Not a fan of abandoning Rstudio notebooks in favor of jupyter i always found them inferior.
Maybe consider evaluating Marimo?
Is there a reason this couldn't have been an extension to VS Code?
I work on Positron and we explain a bit about this here: https://positron.posit.co/faqs.html#why-build-a-new-ide-rath...

tl;dr is that we build a lot of extensions ourselves and are familiar with what you can/can't do with it. Our goals around a data science IDE require more fully integrated experience that isn't possible with the VS Code extension API.