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I deeply loath R for its terrible type idiosyncracies, syntax, and slowness. However, even I must admit that it is incredibly good at what it was meant to do -
by veddox 6y ago
I deeply loath R for its terrible type idiosyncracies, syntax, and slowness.
However, even I must admit that it is incredibly good at what it was meant to do - analyse and display data. (And yes, the tidyverse is a huge improvement of the syntax, although it's telling that they basically reinvented the language to do so.)
As an ecological modeller, I create my actual simulation models in Julia, because it is a much, much better language for any real programming. But I still analyse the output in R.
- dm319 6y agoI don't understand how people can loath R. If you take a functional approach, especially using pipes, dplyr and a split, apply, combine style, it is quite beautiful. Much nicer than trying to, say, divide a time period by an integer in Go.
- grayclhn 6y agoI use a lot of R, and like many aspects of it. But the fact that `f(stop("Hi!"))` may or may not throw an error depending on the internals of `f` is a little maddening. (And there are tons of similar issues.)
- ulucs 6y agoIsn't that just lazy evaluation?
- kescobo 6y ago> If you take a functional approach, especially using pipes, dplyr and a split, apply, combine style, it is quite beautiful Sure, but what if you don't? Sometimes, this is the right way to do things, other times there are other approaches that are more natural/beautiful. In many cases, a loop with conditionals is much easier to understand.