3 ms·
It's really interesting that there are such divergent opinions on R and Python. I'm curious why some people seem to find R incredibly frustrating and Python en
by zestyping 8y ago
It's really interesting that there are such divergent opinions on R and Python. I'm curious why some people seem to find R incredibly frustrating and Python entirely sensible, and others find R miraculous and smooth and Python inaccessible.
Is there some set of improvements to Python that would make it popular with R users, or vice versa? Or is it a fundamental difference in taste that will never be bridged?
- SJetKaran 8y agoI think one reason people may not readily like R, is because it is a functional language. Most programmers are comfortable with object oriented programming rather than the functional style. It takes a while to get used to it. I have seen people who started programming with R, and they get fluent in it pretty fast.
- krutulis 8y agoI've been programming for a long time and had to learn R a few years back for a series of projects. The documentation and community seemed to me, as a newcomer, to be very focused on how to solve particular statistical and modeling problems, and I was almost always able to do what needed to be done relatively quickly. (Python documentation and communities, in contrast, span all kinds of applications that can be difficult even for an experienced programmer learning Python to sort through and evaluate. I can also imagine the migration to 3.x has been a challenge for newcomers.) Although I enjoyed learning and using R, as a CS person I was bothered that I understood how to do X in R, but I had no clue about what was happening when I did X. I found this paper to be particularly useful in describing R from a CS perspective: http://www.lirmm.fr/~ducour/Doc-objets/ECOOP2012/ECOOP/ecoop/104.pdf http://www.lirmm.fr/~ducour/Doc-objets/ECOOP2012/ECOOP/ecoop...