7 ms·

I use R a lot, and nothing in this post rings even the slightest bit true to me. This guy's use case for R seems to be very unlike almost anyone I've ever heard

I use R a lot, and nothing in this post rings even the slightest bit true to me. This guy's use case for R seems to be very unlike almost anyone I've ever heard of. Towards the end of the article, when he's talking about how all he really needs from R is the summary() and boxplot() functions, it really becomes clear that he's never done anything more than dip the very tip of his pinky toe into R. There are lots of valid criticisms of R, but this article doesn't touch on them. It's so off-base that it's the proverbial "not even wrong".

dwrodri 7y ago
I appreciate the feedback! There is definitely more that R offers than what I discuss here. In retrospect, I will be more restrained on my opinions when I have little experience in my pocket. That being said, it was absolutely my intention to present CLI that deviate from R's intended use. There is already plenty out there on R's intended use. What's that adage that goes something like, "if you want to get an answer on the Internet, don't pose a question..."?
- iron0013 7y ago
  I should also say that I didn't mean to sound so curt, and would have chosen my words more carefully if I'd known the author was here in the thread!
  - dwrodri 7y ago
    No offense taken! I'm relatively new to technical writing and the discussion from all of these comments (yours included) has been really helpful for guiding how I write future posts. HN is (in my experience) a lot more cynical and straightforward than other places[1]. It's something I've learned to appreciate and also take it with a grain of salt. 1 = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
    - jrumbut 7y ago
      This is incredibly gracious feedback taking, a lesson in how not to be defensive. I agree with you where some here don't. I think there are often better tools for any single data cleaning task. R's strength is being second best at an enormous range of tasks (and often being first to get new techniques) and packaging that with analysis and visualization.
  - AceJohnny2 7y ago
    > and would have chosen my words more carefully if I'd known the author was here in the thread Not a specific dig against you, but I find it useful to write (and say) anything with the assumption that the author I'm (hypothetically) addressing is a direct witness. It really helps with online civility :)
- mespe 7y ago
  I think it would be more accurate to say "deviate from R's typical use." I use Rscript all the time. I was taught to use it by one of R's developers. While not typical, it is absolutely an "intended" use case. In fact, if you would like to learn more, Software Carpentry has an entire module on using R as a CLI: https://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-inflammation/05-cmdline/ https://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-inflammation/05-cmdli...
  - dwrodri 7y ago
    Bookmarked for later consumption. Thanks for the recommendation!
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    This is beautiful and I only wish I'd found it sooner; thank you for sharing:)
scottlocklin 7y ago
Its definitely a n00b criticism; R is absolutely the shizznits for cleaning and transforming data. You have to use data.tables for larger data sets, but (God Bless Wes) it can't really be beat for this; it does an amazeballs job and has every doodad you can imagine for making your life easier. Cleaning a broken csv or whatever: no, it is crap for that. You use awk/sed/tr and all that for such problems. If you're the type who don't want to deal with R, I guess you can use it from the CLI. A couple of the R deploys I've done work like this. The real problems with R are .... oh man .... so many. R inferno covers a lot of them as a language/environment. Weak database connectivity is another one. The thing which makes me batshit is the nodejsbro-ification of the package management system. Aka people chaining together things like node works; R's package manager isn't designed for this. But also the way code, packaged and otherwise simply rots between the many, many upgrades. You could probably run and deploy scikit learn/pandas based code from 5 years ago without much problem. In R, you have to make a build with the salted package dependencies ... and for all I know stuff it in docker. Anyway unlike python, it basically has every data transformation and statistical tool under the sun. I guess this is the price we pay.
- oarabbus_ 7y ago
  This take is pretty good on the R issues https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2012/06/08/r-the-master-troll-of-statistical-languages/comment-page-1/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2012/06/08/r-the-master-trol...
  - cwyers 7y ago
    I am not sure there is a language where the median user's code looks more different from 2012 to now than R's. RStudio and the tidyverse have basically created an all-new "standard" library for the language that has gotten extremely wide adoption, and it tends to smooth over a lot of R's warts if you stay with code that has been written to fit with the style of code that the tidyverse encourages.
    - oarabbus_ 7y ago
      This sounds like something that in most other languages, would have become R v2 (non-backwards-compatible)? Why does R retrofit instead of enforce best practices?

dwrodri 7y ago

I appreciate the feedback! There is definitely more that R offers than what I discuss here. In retrospect, I will be more restrained on my opinions when I have little experience in my pocket. That being said, it was absolutely my intention to present CLI that deviate from R's intended use. There is already plenty out there on R's intended use. What's that adage that goes something like, "if you want to get an answer on the Internet, don't pose a question..."?

iron0013 7y ago
I should also say that I didn't mean to sound so curt, and would have chosen my words more carefully if I'd known the author was here in the thread!
- dwrodri 7y ago
  No offense taken! I'm relatively new to technical writing and the discussion from all of these comments (yours included) has been really helpful for guiding how I write future posts. HN is (in my experience) a lot more cynical and straightforward than other places[1]. It's something I've learned to appreciate and also take it with a grain of salt. 1 = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
  - jrumbut 7y ago
    This is incredibly gracious feedback taking, a lesson in how not to be defensive. I agree with you where some here don't. I think there are often better tools for any single data cleaning task. R's strength is being second best at an enormous range of tasks (and often being first to get new techniques) and packaging that with analysis and visualization.
- AceJohnny2 7y ago
  > and would have chosen my words more carefully if I'd known the author was here in the thread Not a specific dig against you, but I find it useful to write (and say) anything with the assumption that the author I'm (hypothetically) addressing is a direct witness. It really helps with online civility :)
mespe 7y ago
I think it would be more accurate to say "deviate from R's typical use." I use Rscript all the time. I was taught to use it by one of R's developers. While not typical, it is absolutely an "intended" use case. In fact, if you would like to learn more, Software Carpentry has an entire module on using R as a CLI: https://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-inflammation/05-cmdline/ https://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-inflammation/05-cmdli...
- dwrodri 7y ago
  Bookmarked for later consumption. Thanks for the recommendation!
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  This is beautiful and I only wish I'd found it sooner; thank you for sharing:)

scottlocklin 7y ago

Its definitely a n00b criticism; R is absolutely the shizznits for cleaning and transforming data. You have to use data.tables for larger data sets, but (God Bless Wes) it can't really be beat for this; it does an amazeballs job and has every doodad you can imagine for making your life easier. Cleaning a broken csv or whatever: no, it is crap for that. You use awk/sed/tr and all that for such problems. If you're the type who don't want to deal with R, I guess you can use it from the CLI. A couple of the R deploys I've done work like this. The real problems with R are .... oh man .... so many. R inferno covers a lot of them as a language/environment. Weak database connectivity is another one. The thing which makes me batshit is the nodejsbro-ification of the package management system. Aka people chaining together things like node works; R's package manager isn't designed for this. But also the way code, packaged and otherwise simply rots between the many, many upgrades. You could probably run and deploy scikit learn/pandas based code from 5 years ago without much problem. In R, you have to make a build with the salted package dependencies ... and for all I know stuff it in docker. Anyway unlike python, it basically has every data transformation and statistical tool under the sun. I guess this is the price we pay.

oarabbus_ 7y ago
This take is pretty good on the R issues https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2012/06/08/r-the-master-troll-of-statistical-languages/comment-page-1/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2012/06/08/r-the-master-trol...
- cwyers 7y ago
  I am not sure there is a language where the median user's code looks more different from 2012 to now than R's. RStudio and the tidyverse have basically created an all-new "standard" library for the language that has gotten extremely wide adoption, and it tends to smooth over a lot of R's warts if you stay with code that has been written to fit with the style of code that the tidyverse encourages.
  - oarabbus_ 7y ago
    This sounds like something that in most other languages, would have become R v2 (non-backwards-compatible)? Why does R retrofit instead of enforce best practices?