3 ms·

You have a workshop that could theoretically build a boat, but since crossing the lake is not your job, you don't do it. You feel good about being able to buil

by zwaps 8y ago

You have a workshop that could theoretically build a boat, but since crossing the lake is not your job, you don't do it. You feel good about being able to build a boat. What you do not know is, that if you ever need to cross that lake, you don't have the time to build the boat. And you'd find that you need a special boat, so you have to go back to the rusty boat collection and reverse-engineer it anyway. And there are many other things to organize such that you don't even have the time or money to build your boat.

zaarn 8y ago
I only needed to cross the river once and I'm horrified that there is only a rusty boat and I will complain about that I will refuse to cross the lake until necessary at which point I will evaluate if the safety of my life is worth more than the rusty boat, to which the answer is yes, so I build a new boat.
- zwaps 8y ago
  You almost got it. There are people who need to cross the river. Every day, several times, at different positions that each require different types of boats. These people rely on these boats because although they are rusty and don't look nice, they always get the job done. Since you do not need to cross the river, you are perfectly content with your Ferrari. Although you could upgrade it to a Ferrari-boat, you just don't need to. You could though. It would take a week, but you could. It'll probably be a great Ferrari-boat, if you did everything right. But since you have no interest in crossing the river, you don't understand why people use boats. They are obviously slow and not shiny. And, most of all, they are slow on the road. You don't get it, why use boats? And so you say that boats are bad. But boats are not bad. Boats work for crossing the lake, while your Ferrari does not work except with exceptional upgrades that cost money and time. And people who use boats do not go on the road. They don't need to. But they need to cross that lake, often, and they need their boats. You can argue all you want, but as long as R is the best language and package for doing statistics, your critique is literally "R is not good at something R was not designed to do. In theory, my language would be better than R, although it is not because in the real world my language doesn't have the necessary features".
  - zaarn 8y ago
    It's not about the features, it's literally about library support. If someone wrote an easy to use R-emulator in C then all this would be moot since you could then just bind the libraries into literally every language ever. I'm not proposing that "my language would be better", rather, "every language would be better".
    - FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago
      But nobody has written it and most likely nobody will, because statisticians are perfect happy with R and programmers aren't using R enough to bother.
    - kgwgk 8y ago
      The R interpreter is written in C and there is an API allowing you to use it from other languages.

by zwaps 8y ago

zaarn 8y ago

I only needed to cross the river once and I'm horrified that there is only a rusty boat and I will complain about that I will refuse to cross the lake until necessary at which point I will evaluate if the safety of my life is worth more than the rusty boat, to which the answer is yes, so I build a new boat.

zwaps 8y ago
You almost got it. There are people who need to cross the river. Every day, several times, at different positions that each require different types of boats. These people rely on these boats because although they are rusty and don't look nice, they always get the job done. Since you do not need to cross the river, you are perfectly content with your Ferrari. Although you could upgrade it to a Ferrari-boat, you just don't need to. You could though. It would take a week, but you could. It'll probably be a great Ferrari-boat, if you did everything right. But since you have no interest in crossing the river, you don't understand why people use boats. They are obviously slow and not shiny. And, most of all, they are slow on the road. You don't get it, why use boats? And so you say that boats are bad. But boats are not bad. Boats work for crossing the lake, while your Ferrari does not work except with exceptional upgrades that cost money and time. And people who use boats do not go on the road. They don't need to. But they need to cross that lake, often, and they need their boats. You can argue all you want, but as long as R is the best language and package for doing statistics, your critique is literally "R is not good at something R was not designed to do. In theory, my language would be better than R, although it is not because in the real world my language doesn't have the necessary features".
- zaarn 8y ago
  It's not about the features, it's literally about library support. If someone wrote an easy to use R-emulator in C then all this would be moot since you could then just bind the libraries into literally every language ever. I'm not proposing that "my language would be better", rather, "every language would be better".
  - FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago
    But nobody has written it and most likely nobody will, because statisticians are perfect happy with R and programmers aren't using R enough to bother.
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    The R interpreter is written in C and there is an API allowing you to use it from other languages.