3 ms·
One time I was struggling with some odd R behavior of the sort described by the author. I asked my local R expert. He told me how to fix my program, but I pro
by haberman 8y ago
One time I was struggling with some odd R behavior of the sort described by the author. I asked my local R expert. He told me how to fix my program, but I protested that none of it made any sense, even when explained. He didn't disagree, he just laughed and said "don't worry about it."
That works great for him, he can "not worry about it" and things work because he knows all the quirks.
If I just "don't worry about it" my programs don't work for mysterious reasons.
It seems likely that R could have been designed to have the same strengths without having so many weird and arbitrary quirks.
- rpier001 8y ago> It seems likely that R could have been designed to have the same strengths without having so many weird and arbitrary quirks. Not really... at least not practically. R is a successor to S which was written in 1976 (fun talk on the history: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/rick-becker-s-talk.html http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/rick-becker-s-ta...). Many of the arbitrary quirks started out for the sake of backward compatibility with S. All that being said, yeah, you could probably design a 'modern R' without the weird and arbitrary quirks.