I agree - I teach statistics at a University and there is really no alternative to Rstudio for working with R. This is especially true considering that the vast majority of folk using R (in my field) have no prior programming experience. Downloading R, Vscode, downloading some R plugin, getting them to talk to each other, and only then starting to learn R - isn't very straightforward. It's also remarkably consistent on different operating systems - something to consider when half the students are on windows, half on macos...

RStudio Server on a Digital Ocean instance made my life a lot easier. Students fire up a browser, log in, and they're using R with all the packages. It was horrible when students ran R on their own machines back in the old days. Most of the questions I got were tech support rather than related to the material. And these days it has good Python support too.

It's a lovely website - I have bookmarked it for future reference! I have been to the Potarch cafe many times, for some reason I never noticed the stones...

Thanks! You'll definitely notice them now. If you go on the first Tuesday of the month, you'll see a group of lifters attempting to put themselves in the history books.

There's also a whole day event in August on the green with some stonelifting competitions! In the last few years, it's attracted some elite strongmen and strongwomen too.

I think the key advantage here is adding synthetic amino acids to key sites (e.g., a binding interface). It'll be easier to modify surface chemistry that way, rather than modifying the structure of the entire protein to try and subtly alter a reaction site of interest. But yes, we are a long from adding new amino acids and DNA bases to the natural alphabet - all the molecular machines we currently have are optimised for 4 bases and 20 amino acids, it's not trivial to do it better than nature!