Why do all these tools pretend that knitr / R Markdown never existed, and that they have invented some novel concept? I looked through the docs of Quarto, Jupytext, and now Codebraid, and none of them mention prior art.
There's a long legacy here, it does nobody any good to disregard it. Maybe Knuth is well-acknowledged for his invention, but I think for instance Yihui Xie is a little under-recognized.
Is there some way we could advertise this better? The quarto homepage already says “Quarto is a multi-language, next generation version of R Markdown from Posit, with many new new features and capabilities.”
When talking about Quarto within the R community we usually frame it this way, but obviously it’s not a very useful description if you’ve never heard of RMarkdown.
From what I can tell, Quarto is essentially an installer for Knitr/R, that also comes with a bunch of goodies, like when working in VSC (or Rstudio) it auto-suggests cross-references to content in the document, like figures/chapters/equations/etc. It also has a github action that builds and deploys the site in like 1 one line. Just removing the friction and lowering the bar is very helpful sometimes.
That's true, but quarto also has full support for Python and Jupyter notebooks, not to mention julia, and observable. It's really built from the ground up to be multi-language so that everyone can benefit from all the goodies in RMarkdown.
Though I guess we can stop there in this particular case, unless someone knows of an example of literate programming that precedes Knuth. I'd be interested if there are such examples...
There's a long legacy here, it does nobody any good to disregard it. Maybe Knuth is well-acknowledged for his invention, but I think for instance Yihui Xie is a little under-recognized.