Hi everyone, I have been developing the largest R Shiny app I've ever made ( roughly 800 lines) and the project has gotten to a size where I feel like the development experience is starting to lack. I have done programming in a number of languages like Python, R, JavaScript/HTML, and Rust, and R has been the worst in terms of tooling and the convenience and user-friendliness of the language. At the same time, Python tooling and language features are known to be some of the most user-friendly.
Can you share the changes in the quality of your experience between developing Shiny in R vs. Python?
A few thoughts:
Firstly in your R app, are you using modules and have you got functions in your R/ directory? If not then that's definitely going to help your development experience by simplifying your UI and server functions.
Most of my experience in python is in scripting, but I have made one shiny app: GitHub - simon-smart88/gasbench and I don't think it was that different to R. I'd have thought that your use case (i.e. do you need to use specific R or python packages), your experience (i.e. dplyr vs pandas) and if applicable, who you are working with, would be more important in deciding which to use rather than tooling.
Thanks for the insights. I'll definitely need to get my functions into R/and learn more about modules too.