However: Aside from the above, and doing it "because one can", I don't understand why anyone would spend the effort to make this. R is FOSS software, if you can run a web browser, you can run R itself. R is not hard to install or maintain. Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine.
So, I am a strange combination of impressed with this site and confounded trying to figure out why it exists. I'm probably missing something.
On HN, it seems trivial to install software, but for most people it is not.
Also, tablet and Chromebook users.
The site is running completely locally. You can disable your network in devtools and it will continue to work.
I believe it's George Stagg https://github.com/georgestagg
Since it's now accepted, I guess I can also share the accompanying paper [1] about cloud hardware evolution; the idea is that every plot in the paper is clickable and opens an interactive version of itself. WebR was perfect for this use case.
https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cfj/dis/papers/clouds...
great that these products are finding a way, but there seems to be an opportunity to do this right.