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I think you're wrong. R is an excellent language, targeted specifically around the problems you commonly see when doing data analysis. On the whole the standard

by hadley 11y ago

I think you're wrong. R is an excellent language, targeted specifically around the problems you commonly see when doing data analysis. On the whole the standard libraries aren't particularly good, but I think the language is good. That said, the language is often taught poorly. Here's my attempt to do better: http://adv-r.had.co.nz http://adv-r.had.co.nz

bigtunacan 11y ago
Hadley, Thank you for all of your hard work! Keep on keeping on; your contributions have been phenomenal!
randomsearch 11y ago
> as it explains some of R’s quirks and shows how some parts that seem horrible do have a positive side. That sounds promising, I'll check it out, thanks. I think R is a great tool, but I maintain that it is not a well-designed language by modern standards.
mbreese 11y ago
I think R is a great language for certain applications - namely statistics and some data analysis. Your work has certainly made it better. However, from a computer language design point of view - it leaves a lot to be desired. It's type system is seems very complicated and while the language tries to do what it thinks you want, it's not always clear what is going on (are you working on a matrix or a dataframe that has been cast into a matrix?). For me, R is one of those languages that is good in a certain domain, but once you get out of that domain, it makes things more complicated than they need to be. It just isn't a general purpose language. By far, the biggest problems I've seen have been people who only know R (mainly stats people or biologists) try to do something in R that would be a quick 10 line Python/Perl/Ruby/whatever script. Normally for a language design, you aim to make easy things easy, and difficult things possible. For R, it seems like it makes difficult things easy and easy things difficult. Maybe that's the tradeoff that was needed. :) That said - please keep doing what you're doing. You've made my R work vastly easier.
solomatov 11y ago
Could you give a couple of examples, where R is substantially superior to Python?
roel_v 11y ago
Well, time to bring out my favorite dead horse to beat: - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1815606/rscript-determine-path-of-the-executing-script - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3452086/getting-path-of-an-r-script (where you already commented, so it's not like this is something new...) I would say that any language that does not have a facility to get the path of the current file, is not 'excellent' under the criteria an experienced programmer would use for assessing it. Now, I very well know that those criteria are different from what scientists use, but still...

by hadley 11y ago

bigtunacan 11y ago

Hadley, Thank you for all of your hard work! Keep on keeping on; your contributions have been phenomenal!

randomsearch 11y ago

> as it explains some of R’s quirks and shows how some parts that seem horrible do have a positive side. That sounds promising, I'll check it out, thanks. I think R is a great tool, but I maintain that it is not a well-designed language by modern standards.

mbreese 11y ago

I think R is a great language for certain applications - namely statistics and some data analysis. Your work has certainly made it better. However, from a computer language design point of view - it leaves a lot to be desired. It's type system is seems very complicated and while the language tries to do what it thinks you want, it's not always clear what is going on (are you working on a matrix or a dataframe that has been cast into a matrix?). For me, R is one of those languages that is good in a certain domain, but once you get out of that domain, it makes things more complicated than they need to be. It just isn't a general purpose language. By far, the biggest problems I've seen have been people who only know R (mainly stats people or biologists) try to do something in R that would be a quick 10 line Python/Perl/Ruby/whatever script. Normally for a language design, you aim to make easy things easy, and difficult things possible. For R, it seems like it makes difficult things easy and easy things difficult. Maybe that's the tradeoff that was needed. :) That said - please keep doing what you're doing. You've made my R work vastly easier.

solomatov 11y ago

Could you give a couple of examples, where R is substantially superior to Python?

roel_v 11y ago

Well, time to bring out my favorite dead horse to beat: - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1815606/rscript-determine-path-of-the-executing-script - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3452086/getting-path-of-an-r-script (where you already commented, so it's not like this is something new...) I would say that any language that does not have a facility to get the path of the current file, is not 'excellent' under the criteria an experienced programmer would use for assessing it. Now, I very well know that those criteria are different from what scientists use, but still...