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Love! "R is a shockingly dreadful language for an exceptionally useful data analysis environment. The more you learn about the R language, the worse it will fe
by shanusmagnus 10y ago
Love!
"R is a shockingly dreadful language for an exceptionally useful data analysis environment. The more you learn about the R language, the worse it will feel. The development environment suffers from literally decades of accretion of stupid hacks from a community containing, to a first-order approximation, zero software engineers."
Yup.
- charles-salvia 10y agoThe first time I tried to read R code I was immediately disgusted with how '.' is a valid variable name character. Not only valid, but inexplicably also in common use.
- gone35 10y agoThat's in part because, unaccountably, '_' denotes assignment in S.
- yuubi 10y ago> unaccountably Maybe because in ASCII-63 the _ codepoint meant left-arrow (which was preserved in at least smalltalk systems much past the 60s)?
- shanusmagnus 10y agoMy theory is that they might have been trying to protest against the non-mathematical theft of = (equality) to mean assignment, as = is used in most other languages. (Not that that's an excuse for violating the shit out of the Principle of Least Surprise in a trillion different ways.)