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> Their concerns are generally valid, but they should keep in mind a lot of people using do not have a software development background and do not care that the
by yodsanklai 8y ago
> Their concerns are generally valid, but they should keep in mind a lot of people using do not have a software development background and do not care that the language is not elegantly designed
To me, the opposite is true. People with no CS background would benefit the most from a simple design.
> in R, data types are pretty fungible, everything is a vector, coercing things generally "just works".
Things just work until they don't, and then you need to understand all the weirdness of R.
I don't know what's the typical experience of a non-programmer with R, but as a programmer, I had some headache trying to understand R semantics (apparently I'm not the only one [1]).
[1] http://r.cs.purdue.edu/pub/ecoop12.pdf http://r.cs.purdue.edu/pub/ecoop12.pdf
- extr 8y agoI have a lot of experience teaching non-programmers R. Most of them come from an Excel/SQL background. I have found the amount of weirdness that presents a real problem is very low. And when it does get weird, I usually advise we just brush it under the rug and use a different method to accomplish the same thing. This probably sounds horrifying, but it's really not. Most of the code people write in R is not like other programming languages, it's rarely bound for anything other than the end user's laptop, if its even saved in the first place.