Make ARK available as a kernel for Quarto

[juliasilge]

Background motivation

We have lots of users who want an inline experience for their Quarto editing or a send-to-console experience for their Jupyter notebooks; see #1533. As of this writing, we would say our advice is:

• If you want an inline experience, use .ipynb
• If you want a send-to-console experience, use .qmd

If we are going to recommend this, people need to be able to convert between the two, and right now an R user cannot quarto convert test.qmd very well. To make this better, Quarto needs to be able to find our R Jupyter kernel.

Status as of writing

I don't see ARK at all right now if I do quarto check jupyter. I observe that we currently offer this advice:

https://github.com/posit-dev/amalthea/blob/main/README.md#standalone

At the current writing, we have some outstanding issues on Jupyter compatibility, like #281

[jthomasmock]

I'll add on that currently Quarto 1.5 dev builds don't round-trip .qmd to .ipynb very cleanly:

quarto convert doesn't roundtrip the kernel information:

---
title: "Test R Quarto"
format: html
jupyter:
    kernelspec:
        name: "ir43"
        language: "R"
        display_name: "R 4.3.2"
---

```{r}
library(ggplot2)

Becomes

<img width="543" alt="image" src="https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/assets/29187501/de864c8a-63be-4a19-a480-65e1f711a73b">

[ntluong95]

Hi Julia,

I have been involved in this topic of debate several places and completely oppose to your opinion. The experience I have with quarto document in Rstudio is much better than with Vscode. When you launch Positron project, I was expecting a bright future for Quarto but the thing you are proposing completely go the wrong direction. R user will keep using Quarto, and Python will keep using Jupyter notebook. There will be never an evolution that they both work on the same document, in the same IDE. Please support in-line result for Quarto, and bring more features to make working with Quarto in Positron is exclusively different

[juliasilge]

Thanks for sharing your preferences @ntluong95! It's certainly helpful knowing more about what people would like to see in Positron. 👍

If you're interested in reading about some of the problems we have run into when supporting mixed inline and send-to-console authoring in RStudio, you can check that out here.

[danieltomasz]

I am sharing the sentiment of having the possibility of inline output in qmd will be really important to hold to the original spirit and intention of Rmd files (and I am the person who sometimes work on ipynb and qmd in the same project, both in R as in Python); but I still understand that the Vscode based Positron and Rstudio will be not on par with features for some time, even if Positron grow up