A lot of environments built for data analysis are specifically built to use one language for scientific computing
Tools you may have heard about or used in this category include RStudio, Matlab, Spyder – there’s a lot of these
There are real limits to these kinds of tools or IDEs, especially for the high proportion of people who use multiple languages for data science
Literally on the same project, over the span of a week on different projects, or over the span of their career
Many of you are familiar with this, with combinations like R + Rust, Python + Javascript, or basically any data science language + SQL
By contrast with these IDES or editors that are built for one language, Positron is built with frontend, user-facing features that are about the tasks you need to do when you’re analyzing data and doing other data-specific work
backend language packs that provide the engines for all those features and tasks
Here, you see some of those, like a console, plots, variables, in addition to where you are editing your code
