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"BUT to say I gave up on a language because it has so many options is strange to me." This is a regular concern in designing a programming language. Give coder

"BUT to say I gave up on a language because it has so many options is strange to me." This is a regular concern in designing a programming language. Give coders too much freedom and they invent 20 ways to do the same thing, none really clearly better than the other. Restrict the freedom and there's more like 3-4 ways to do something, and usually one is better then the rest. As a new user to R, I must say that the single hardest thing has been learning all the different ways to do something. Each blog/stackoverflow/etc... article I read seems to propose 5 different ways to do each thing. At the end of it, I'm left not really knowing how things work best.

angdis 11y ago
There is a weirdness to R. I found that taking a lot of time to focus on the basics helps. If you're committed to using R, read John Chamber's book and also look for answers on the old "R mailing list" (a place so mean, it makes stackoverflow look like mister roger's neighborhood).
- baldfat 11y ago
  Working in the Hadley Wickham's Universe with dplyr ggplot2/ggvis and stringr really helps a ton.
  - angdis 11y ago
    Absolutely, and don't forget tidyr! Its hard to overstate Mr Wickham's contribution to making R a very handy and useful tool. I am sure that a lot of folks would have tried R and then moved on to something else were it not for the "Hadley-verse".
    - baldfat 11y ago
      It is the simple Functional language we want when working with data.
hunterratliff1 11y ago
If you're new to R, I'd highly recommend learning everything using Hadley Wickham's packages. When I was first getting started I had the same problem, and IMO Hadley's solutions offer the best maintainability. Especially with how quickly R is growing, the time that Hadley has invested in teaching makes me believe that his approach will continue to be one of the guiding influences for the future of the language. Just my two cents though!

angdis 11y ago

There is a weirdness to R. I found that taking a lot of time to focus on the basics helps. If you're committed to using R, read John Chamber's book and also look for answers on the old "R mailing list" (a place so mean, it makes stackoverflow look like mister roger's neighborhood).

baldfat 11y ago
Working in the Hadley Wickham's Universe with dplyr ggplot2/ggvis and stringr really helps a ton.
- angdis 11y ago
  Absolutely, and don't forget tidyr! Its hard to overstate Mr Wickham's contribution to making R a very handy and useful tool. I am sure that a lot of folks would have tried R and then moved on to something else were it not for the "Hadley-verse".
  - baldfat 11y ago
    It is the simple Functional language we want when working with data.

hunterratliff1 11y ago

If you're new to R, I'd highly recommend learning everything using Hadley Wickham's packages. When I was first getting started I had the same problem, and IMO Hadley's solutions offer the best maintainability. Especially with how quickly R is growing, the time that Hadley has invested in teaching makes me believe that his approach will continue to be one of the guiding influences for the future of the language. Just my two cents though!