I switched to Positron a few months ago and have mostly found it seamless.

I'm an academic bioinformatician/data scientist and I mostly use R to do my data visualization and table wrangling. I use quarto documents. Before positron I used RStudio as well as VSCode with lots of extensions to add R functionality there.

My main gripes with Positron are no inline plots underneath code chunks, and some bugs where sending code to the console from code chunks occasionally stops working until restarting the program, and View() occasionally stops working. But the better file explorer, integration with Claude Code, and access to most of my VSCode extensions make it worth it for me.

It is sort of tautological:

    # variable A has three causes: C1,C2,C3
    C1 <- rnorm(100)
    C2 <- rnorm(100)
    C3 <- rnorm(100)

    A <- ifelse(C1 + C2 + C3 > 1, 1, 0)

    cor(A, C1)
    cor(A, C2)
    cor(A, C3)

    # If we set the values of A ourselves...
    A <- sample(c(1,0), 100, replace=TRUE)

    # then A no longer has correlation with its natural causes

    cor(A, C1)
    cor(A, C2)
    cor(A, C3)

I never considered leaving my IBM Field Engineering job. The job was rewarding and gave me a great sense of purpose; however it was very stressful and had a lot of high expectations. With the 360 line of computers the field was flooded with engineering changes (ECs) to be installed and IBM eventually hired part time people just to install ECs. The ECs eventually fixed the many problems with the 360s and the job demands settled down to more normal.

Every form of memory storage I was exposed to worked well except for the delay line storage unit in the controller for 2260 CRTs. IT WAS VERY TEMPERATURE SENSITIVE and required a lot of maintenance. THANKFULLY it was not around very long.

I was in a resident territory 60 miles from the home office and we stocked a good supply of parts but far from any part you would ever need. My branch office stocked a higher level of parts and would send them to me via taxi if needed. The regional parts center in Atlanta would air freight over night to the Birmingham airport and I would meet the airplane. I had a part removed from a production line machine and sent to me for a repair. Part support was very good. In the 1990s when I was working for TSS we did get vans so we could have some parts with us.

I do not know about IBM today but during my time working for the company they were the greatest company to work for if business was good but in bad times for the company their number one priority was the bottom line.

I have no idea where computing will be in 60 years. The tool I miss most is the oscilloscope. It was great fun and satisfaction to set up the scope and computer and be able to see the display of the electronic signals while you looked for a missing or erroneous signal. You had outsmarted the computer. The top do in my days was if you did not have a good handle on a problem in two hours call for help. grandfather

I do not remember people being concerned about computers replacing them because in the 60s and 70s computers were creating a lot more jobs than they were replacing and automation had not taken over at that time. IBM had a very good support network all the way to the plant if necessary.

I did not work on the computers you referred to and my favorite computer was the 360 model 40 (2040) because it was very reliable and relatively easy to work on because by then I understood the microcode much better. grandfather

I was a hardware tech and we installed updates or patches to the computer micro code many times without replacing the entire code. I think most programmers preferred to fix the problems rather than start over. grandfather