I was really hoping that this was better support for an R kernel for Jupyter.
Instead, R is reinventing that particular device.
Reinventing can be a good thing: but Jupyter is universal, not just Python. This is just Markdown + R, which, though cool, has been a problem heavily handled by someone else.
Jupyter in R could have solved this problem, and offered R up as more of a competing platform.
RStudio is a platform, and a company, focused exclusively on R programming – it dates back to 2009. That's several years before the launch of Project Jupyter, though IPython has been in development since 2001.
I'd love to see RStudio branch out and provide feature-for-feature Python functionality (at least), but I don't think that's likely to happen.
Instead, R is reinventing that particular device.
Reinventing can be a good thing: but Jupyter is universal, not just Python. This is just Markdown + R, which, though cool, has been a problem heavily handled by someone else.
Jupyter in R could have solved this problem, and offered R up as more of a competing platform.