R notebooks behave similarly to org-mode, albeit with fewer supported languages and a few less options for controlling execution and value passing between code blocks. Org-mode is the oldest and most powerful environment of this sort that I know of.
That said, for new users, I think R Notebooks are less daunting than Emacs + org-mode.
Like most things associated with RStudio and the Tidyverse, I feel that they’ve really done their homework. Even if org-mode does more, I feel it’s pretty evident that R Notebooks at least made an effort to understand org-mode’s prior art.
It was obviously inspired by many different things but the most direct genealogy is WEB [1] → noweb → Sweave → Knitr → R Markdown → R Notebooks.
Mathematica’s notebook interface in turn was almost certainly also inspired (directly or indirectly) by WEB, given that this was the first literate programming tool ever created.
That said, for new users, I think R Notebooks are less daunting than Emacs + org-mode.
Like most things associated with RStudio and the Tidyverse, I feel that they’ve really done their homework. Even if org-mode does more, I feel it’s pretty evident that R Notebooks at least made an effort to understand org-mode’s prior art.