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I don’t hate R as much as I hate universities insisting on mandatory use of R for all comp-stat courses. This to my mind verges on civil rights infringements. B

by dxbydt 8y ago

I don’t hate R as much as I hate universities insisting on mandatory use of R for all comp-stat courses. This to my mind verges on civil rights infringements. Bear in mind we aren’t talking about a private institution such as a company, where when you sign on as a dev for a paycheck, you do so voluntarily, knowing that the company uses X language and you won’t have a choice in the matter. In a public university, students, especially grad students, who go on to do research and write papers etc., must have a choice in what they use. If I don’t like R, doesn’t matter what the reasons behind my dislike, I should have a choice. Let me use numpy, scipy.stats and pandas. How does that bother you ? First of all, you should be teaching statistical concepts, not syntax - so this whole notion that graders & TAs don’t know python is nonsense. Let them grade my numerical answers, not the R syntax used to get that answer. And at that point, how does it matter if I use R or python to get my answers ? Sorry, had to get that off my chest ( and don’t even get me started about sas )

benmaraschino 8y ago
Well, the purported civil rights issues aside (which is a patently absurd point of argument on its face) – if you’re at the point where you’ve accumulated enough experience with both environments to form strong preferences for one over the other, that’s a decent sign that said course might just not be a good fit for you. I mean, professors and TAs are pretty overloaded already, and asking them to redesign course materials to accommodate additional environments is a tall order, especially for introductory courses.
chrfrasco 8y ago
> This to my mind verges on civil rights infringements You're funny!
edtechdev 8y ago
It's better than forcing students to pay for proprietary statistical analysis tools like SPSS, etc.
- curiousgal 8y ago
  There are running jokes amongst stats students about those who resort to using SPSS and EViews. It's mostly because of the GUI as most of the students use SAS (proprietary and expensive) as well as R.
thousandautumns 8y ago
Because then students start using 3 or 4 different languages, can't figure something out, and come bitching to the TA to tell them what they did wrong, and now the TA needs to know 5 different ways to implement the same thing. Ironically, you complain about wanting to learn statistical concepts, and not a language, but by focusing on a single language, they can minimize the amount of time spent on agonizing over lines of code trying to get to the same answer, and instead focus on the actual statistical problem. Its also important to note that there are lots of potential pitfalls for people who don't know about them. For example, scikit-learn is the most popular python package out there for most data analysis work. But I would bet my ass that at least 50+% of its users don't realize that the logistic regression implementation implements L2 regularization by default, and in fact there is no (non-hackish) way of implementing non-penalized logistic regression. So you will be getting completely different answers than someone who would be using R, SAS, SPSS, etc. And the only way for someone to know this is for someone to understand the implementation of the function in all possible languages.
CJefferson 8y ago
That's fine on one condition. If you get the wrong answer, you just get 0 and no feedback. With a library and language I know, I can look though, advise on what went wrong and see how close you got. If I have to start supporting every language in the world, that's simply not reasonable.

by dxbydt 8y ago

benmaraschino 8y ago

Well, the purported civil rights issues aside (which is a patently absurd point of argument on its face) – if you’re at the point where you’ve accumulated enough experience with both environments to form strong preferences for one over the other, that’s a decent sign that said course might just not be a good fit for you. I mean, professors and TAs are pretty overloaded already, and asking them to redesign course materials to accommodate additional environments is a tall order, especially for introductory courses.

chrfrasco 8y ago

> This to my mind verges on civil rights infringements You're funny!

edtechdev 8y ago

It's better than forcing students to pay for proprietary statistical analysis tools like SPSS, etc.

curiousgal 8y ago
There are running jokes amongst stats students about those who resort to using SPSS and EViews. It's mostly because of the GUI as most of the students use SAS (proprietary and expensive) as well as R.

thousandautumns 8y ago

Because then students start using 3 or 4 different languages, can't figure something out, and come bitching to the TA to tell them what they did wrong, and now the TA needs to know 5 different ways to implement the same thing. Ironically, you complain about wanting to learn statistical concepts, and not a language, but by focusing on a single language, they can minimize the amount of time spent on agonizing over lines of code trying to get to the same answer, and instead focus on the actual statistical problem. Its also important to note that there are lots of potential pitfalls for people who don't know about them. For example, scikit-learn is the most popular python package out there for most data analysis work. But I would bet my ass that at least 50+% of its users don't realize that the logistic regression implementation implements L2 regularization by default, and in fact there is no (non-hackish) way of implementing non-penalized logistic regression. So you will be getting completely different answers than someone who would be using R, SAS, SPSS, etc. And the only way for someone to know this is for someone to understand the implementation of the function in all possible languages.

CJefferson 8y ago

That's fine on one condition. If you get the wrong answer, you just get 0 and no feedback. With a library and language I know, I can look though, advise on what went wrong and see how close you got. If I have to start supporting every language in the world, that's simply not reasonable.