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I don’t even understand the not a real language critique, R: - is based on scheme, a HN favourite; - integrates very well with C++ through RCpp allowing you t

I don’t even understand the not a real language critique, R: - is based on scheme, a HN favourite; - integrates very well with C++ through RCpp allowing you to do whatever you want. 9/10 times someone already went through the trouble for you.

kickout 7y ago
I agree; which is why I generally get confused when I see that criticism. This is only an assumption though; maybe its just a vocal minority that don't like R or I only notice the negative comments. Who knows
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  For what it’s worth, I am a JavaScript programmer and I feel like HN shits on JS All. The. Time. Some people just like to shit on languages. I think it’s just insecurity. They worry a lot about whether they’re a good enough developer, so they try hard to be on the “most advanced” platform they can figure out, and then need to talk down to the other platforms. Secure, talented, older developers, in my experience, tend to be open to whatever technology is most appropriate. They have confidence in their ability to learn new things. And see the good traits of any tech, as well as the bad one—a necessary skill if you’re going to be the kind of developer who can make traction in any situation. The platform fetishists can only really work from inside their special tower.
  - newen 7y ago
    Javascript is just a terrible language and programming environment though. Anyone can criticize people who disagree with them by calling them "insecure". It's a meaningless argument.
thom 7y ago
I don't think there's any shame in R effectively being a good, productive DSL for a lot of stats and viz work, built around fast stuff written in C++. I also think this is largely true of a lot of Python as well, tbh. In the future my hope is that projects like Arrow end up with even more of the workload being taken off R's shoulders.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  I'm a data scientist and, frankly, I really strongly prefer R over Python. Its mostly the whitespace in Python, but the language is also slow and crufty as heck. R, if you use it responsibly, feels a lot more like your standard, lexically scoped, dynamically typed language.
atheriel 7y ago
Absolutely. I usually respond to the "R-is-not-a-real-language" line with something like "R is syntactic sugar on a Lisp where the atoms are APL arrays". It's plenty interesting from a computer science perspective, if you bother to look. For instance, why does R use <- instead of = for assignment? Because initial versions (of S) predate C -- developed down the hall -- the language that first introduced = for assignment.
nerdponx 7y ago
The R standard library is kind of weird and hard to use for "general purpose" programming. It's very clearly a domain specific language. Also, it's unbelievably slow for basic operations like looping, function calls, and variable assignment. It's literally orders of magnitude slower than Python (I've tested it). Unlike its fellow C-flavored-Lisp Javascript, R retains an extreme level of homoiconicity, Which apparently makes the language very difficult to compile or optimize. I don't know how e.g. SBCL does it, but over the lifetime of the R language no one has managed to implement a non-trivial subset of R that performs better than GNU R (fastR was never finished to my knowledge). So you are basically relegated to writing code in C, Fortran, or C++ if you need even decent performance. Otherwise you are stuck using "vectorized" operations like lapply(), which are fine but make for a jarring experience if you're coming from other languages. So of course it's a "real" language in the sense that Bash is a real language. But it's ultimately and fundamentally a domain-specific scripting language and I don't know if there is a way around that.
- kgwgk 7y ago
  Are you aware of Radford Neal’s pqR? https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/ https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    I had heard of it in the past but I didn't realize it was in a finished state and keeping pace with recent R versions. I'll read up on it, thank you. Edit: looks like it's still a full major version behind? To be fair, there weren't many significant changes between R 2.x and 3.x.
    - kgwgk 7y ago
      Well, it may not be keeping up with the new versions but at least it does cover a non-trivial subset of the standard implementation. :-) I have not tried it in many years and I don't know how much faster or compatible it is. Nevertheless, I think it's a good thing that an "outsider" is looking at performance issues. As far as I know it's essentially a one-man's effort. One could imagine that RStudio or Microsoft would be able to improve R performance substantially if they wanted to.
epistasis 7y ago
The "not a real language" critique often comes from those without any knowledge of Scheme; "real" languages are like C# or Java, and maybe Python, even though the lisp-like properties of Python are not so much appreciated. As C# and Java have gotten more functional aspects over the years, I've seen less and less of the "not a real language" criticism.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
vincent-toups 7y ago
"Based on Scheme" really, profoundly, oversells it. R's idea of Scheme is deeply bizarre and profoundly outdated.
GlennS 7y ago
There's really not much Lisp/Scheme left in R these days. Function arguments/environments are still pairlists: a type of cons cell. You can manipulate the parameters to a function as symbols before you evaluate them. This is useful — many very good R libraries all make heavy use of it — and certainly very interesting. Lispers probably know it as quote/antiquote. I suppose we could also point that, much like most Lisps, R gives you plenty of object systems to choose from... And that's about it for R-as-a-Lisp. It's also a really bad language for working with tree-structured data, something Lisps normally excel at.
laichzeit0 7y ago
The last time I tried putting a REST API in front of my predictive model, I used plumbr. I also then learned that the R runtime was single threaded, so that only 1 request could be processed at a time. I don’t know how you can overcome this, and it makes things significantly difficult to put into a real production environment. I’m sure someone will chime in that there are different runtimes, like Microsoft’s (does this run on MacOS? If not, how can I use it to develop and test on my laptop) or some expensive RStudio solution. The fact is you have none of those problems in e.g., Python. Although I would prefer to use Caret for many predictive modeling tasks, it is non-trivial to take the R runtime to production. That was what I walked away with.

kickout 7y ago

I agree; which is why I generally get confused when I see that criticism. This is only an assumption though; maybe its just a vocal minority that don't like R or I only notice the negative comments. Who knows

erikpukinskis 7y ago
For what it’s worth, I am a JavaScript programmer and I feel like HN shits on JS All. The. Time. Some people just like to shit on languages. I think it’s just insecurity. They worry a lot about whether they’re a good enough developer, so they try hard to be on the “most advanced” platform they can figure out, and then need to talk down to the other platforms. Secure, talented, older developers, in my experience, tend to be open to whatever technology is most appropriate. They have confidence in their ability to learn new things. And see the good traits of any tech, as well as the bad one—a necessary skill if you’re going to be the kind of developer who can make traction in any situation. The platform fetishists can only really work from inside their special tower.
- newen 7y ago
  Javascript is just a terrible language and programming environment though. Anyone can criticize people who disagree with them by calling them "insecure". It's a meaningless argument.

thom 7y ago

I don't think there's any shame in R effectively being a good, productive DSL for a lot of stats and viz work, built around fast stuff written in C++. I also think this is largely true of a lot of Python as well, tbh. In the future my hope is that projects like Arrow end up with even more of the workload being taken off R's shoulders.

vincent-toups 7y ago
I'm a data scientist and, frankly, I really strongly prefer R over Python. Its mostly the whitespace in Python, but the language is also slow and crufty as heck. R, if you use it responsibly, feels a lot more like your standard, lexically scoped, dynamically typed language.

atheriel 7y ago

Absolutely. I usually respond to the "R-is-not-a-real-language" line with something like "R is syntactic sugar on a Lisp where the atoms are APL arrays". It's plenty interesting from a computer science perspective, if you bother to look. For instance, why does R use <- instead of = for assignment? Because initial versions (of S) predate C -- developed down the hall -- the language that first introduced = for assignment.

nerdponx 7y ago

The R standard library is kind of weird and hard to use for "general purpose" programming. It's very clearly a domain specific language. Also, it's unbelievably slow for basic operations like looping, function calls, and variable assignment. It's literally orders of magnitude slower than Python (I've tested it). Unlike its fellow C-flavored-Lisp Javascript, R retains an extreme level of homoiconicity, Which apparently makes the language very difficult to compile or optimize. I don't know how e.g. SBCL does it, but over the lifetime of the R language no one has managed to implement a non-trivial subset of R that performs better than GNU R (fastR was never finished to my knowledge). So you are basically relegated to writing code in C, Fortran, or C++ if you need even decent performance. Otherwise you are stuck using "vectorized" operations like lapply(), which are fine but make for a jarring experience if you're coming from other languages. So of course it's a "real" language in the sense that Bash is a real language. But it's ultimately and fundamentally a domain-specific scripting language and I don't know if there is a way around that.

kgwgk 7y ago
Are you aware of Radford Neal’s pqR? https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/ https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/
- nerdponx 7y ago
  I had heard of it in the past but I didn't realize it was in a finished state and keeping pace with recent R versions. I'll read up on it, thank you. Edit: looks like it's still a full major version behind? To be fair, there weren't many significant changes between R 2.x and 3.x.
  - kgwgk 7y ago
    Well, it may not be keeping up with the new versions but at least it does cover a non-trivial subset of the standard implementation. :-) I have not tried it in many years and I don't know how much faster or compatible it is. Nevertheless, I think it's a good thing that an "outsider" is looking at performance issues. As far as I know it's essentially a one-man's effort. One could imagine that RStudio or Microsoft would be able to improve R performance substantially if they wanted to.

epistasis 7y ago

The "not a real language" critique often comes from those without any knowledge of Scheme; "real" languages are like C# or Java, and maybe Python, even though the lisp-like properties of Python are not so much appreciated. As C# and Java have gotten more functional aspects over the years, I've seen less and less of the "not a real language" criticism.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

vincent-toups 7y ago

"Based on Scheme" really, profoundly, oversells it. R's idea of Scheme is deeply bizarre and profoundly outdated.

GlennS 7y ago

There's really not much Lisp/Scheme left in R these days. Function arguments/environments are still pairlists: a type of cons cell. You can manipulate the parameters to a function as symbols before you evaluate them. This is useful — many very good R libraries all make heavy use of it — and certainly very interesting. Lispers probably know it as quote/antiquote. I suppose we could also point that, much like most Lisps, R gives you plenty of object systems to choose from... And that's about it for R-as-a-Lisp. It's also a really bad language for working with tree-structured data, something Lisps normally excel at.

laichzeit0 7y ago

The last time I tried putting a REST API in front of my predictive model, I used plumbr. I also then learned that the R runtime was single threaded, so that only 1 request could be processed at a time. I don’t know how you can overcome this, and it makes things significantly difficult to put into a real production environment. I’m sure someone will chime in that there are different runtimes, like Microsoft’s (does this run on MacOS? If not, how can I use it to develop and test on my laptop) or some expensive RStudio solution. The fact is you have none of those problems in e.g., Python. Although I would prefer to use Caret for many predictive modeling tasks, it is non-trivial to take the R runtime to production. That was what I walked away with.