> Quarto combines the functionality of R Markdown, bookdown, distill, xaringian, etc into a single consistent system with “batteries included” that reflects everything we’ve learned from R Markdown over the past 10 years.
AND the biggest advantage: it does not require R. I also like it because it brings the Rstudio style notebook to Python. I dislike Jupyter style notebooks, which are these chunks. Just a personal preference.
Yup! You can actually render jupyter notebooks into quarto outputs. I like Quarto better than Jupyter because it's a lot easier to version control .qmd files.
(disclosure: I'm a Quarto dev) You can also render _to_ Jupyter notebooks from .qmd files, in case that would be useful for your workflow. We've put a lot of effort into making Jupyter interop a good experience in Quarto, for folks in either the Knitr or Jupyter ecosystem.
Folks have already noted that you can run content through any Jupyter kernel. That lets you run Python and Julia code in a familiar runtime environment, and without having to install the R runtime and dependencies.
I also think that our IDE tooling is pretty good. If you're running in VS code, we'll (for example) highlight problems in your YAML frontmatter, resolve document crossreferences in the editor, etc.
We do this in an editor-agnostic way, so the Quarto IDE tooling can be adopted by third-party. We (Posit the company) develop the RStudio integration and VS Code extension, but there exist modes developed by the community such as quarto-nvim.
A good way to think about Quarto is "a next-generation RMarkdown with many lessons we learned and an emphasis on multiple language support".
The main benefit is that you get a Python (or R, Julia or Rust) interpreter. So you can evaluate code. A good example of the value of this is the Ibis docs which use Quarto: https://ibis-project.org/
