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I use R multiple hours every day, I love it, I love the ecosystem, but I can't help thinking that it's showing its age. It does a great job on static analysis a
by vegabook 10y ago
I use R multiple hours every day, I love it, I love the ecosystem, but I can't help thinking that it's showing its age. It does a great job on static analysis and visualization of smaller (< 1 gigabyte) data sets, but is seriously challenged by anything significantly larger, and is unfit for purpose if the data is changing rapidly (eg streaming). I unfortunately am slowly coming to the conclusion that Spark and Flink style tools are where data science will be at in a few years time, and while I know you can use R as a layer on top of these, I think other aspects of R also hold you back, paradoxically, things like the excellent base and ggplot graphics, which are rightly lauded as excellent, but are very low-dimensional in a world where tensors increasingly rule. I think R will remain hugely relevant for a long time, and is, what I tell people, like Excel^2, but it's getting to point where the world is moving on and it will struggle if it's not rewritten from the ground up with a much faster, multicore, threaded, distributed implementation.
- dandermotj 10y agoI genuinely think these type of thoughts come from having extensive experience as a programmer, that can consider building out systems that might reach the performance ceiling of R. For 99% of people multicore/distributed architecture will never even be a consideration. But I'm with you, in that having these things from a system engineers perspective would be incredible. There are other implementations of R out there (not just R GNU): Hadley Wickham's discusses them in Advanced R somewhere.