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Agreed about Hadley's prolific work. I used to work a lot with R many years ago. I was shocked to find how bad the documentation was, and worse how rude and un

by revorad 11y ago

Agreed about Hadley's prolific work. I used to work a lot with R many years ago. I was shocked to find how bad the documentation was, and worse how rude and unfriendly the "community" of grumpy professors was. I shudder to think of the horrible meanness towards beginners asking questions on the mailing list. I got so fed up I even wrote a book about R data visualisation. But this was all just around the time ggplot2 came out. Unfortunately I stopped using R soon after, but since then Hadley has single-handedly done more good for the language than anyone else. I don't know what the R community is like now, and whether people like Hadley have made it friendlier, but it's clearly one reason Python is superior.

danso 11y ago
I'm a late arrival to the language and have almost interacted with it exclusively through StackOverflow and Github. I've been astonished at not just how friendly people are, but how quickly I can get a helpful response to even what I feel are pretty esoteric (and dumb) questions...again, one of the problems of coming into R is that, because of the relatively small community, there aren't as many references or easily Googlable answers compared to Python...but getting answers to questions if you ask them is very easy, and I think that's a credit to the community. On the other hand, there seem to be a lot of useful libraries that haven't been ported over to Github or are otherwise easily accessible beyond CRAN...Many of them probably don't get as much exposure as they would if they were more easily discoverable...and I honestly don't even know where, in those cases, to start the bug reporting/patching process. That's obviously the fault of my being spoiled by Github...but that's kind of the point, there's a bit more friction in contributing to R than you might find in Python/Ruby/etc.
- revorad 11y ago
  Yeah there's a lot more R stuff on SO now than when I was using it. The mailing lists were more active so that's what I had to use to ask for help.
hadley 11y ago
Thanks!

by revorad 11y ago

danso 11y ago

I'm a late arrival to the language and have almost interacted with it exclusively through StackOverflow and Github. I've been astonished at not just how friendly people are, but how quickly I can get a helpful response to even what I feel are pretty esoteric (and dumb) questions...again, one of the problems of coming into R is that, because of the relatively small community, there aren't as many references or easily Googlable answers compared to Python...but getting answers to questions if you ask them is very easy, and I think that's a credit to the community. On the other hand, there seem to be a lot of useful libraries that haven't been ported over to Github or are otherwise easily accessible beyond CRAN...Many of them probably don't get as much exposure as they would if they were more easily discoverable...and I honestly don't even know where, in those cases, to start the bug reporting/patching process. That's obviously the fault of my being spoiled by Github...but that's kind of the point, there's a bit more friction in contributing to R than you might find in Python/Ruby/etc.

revorad 11y ago
Yeah there's a lot more R stuff on SO now than when I was using it. The mailing lists were more active so that's what I had to use to ask for help.

hadley 11y ago

Thanks!