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I basically worked as an R troubleshooter in a Pharmaceutical company, and honestly I wish python or Julia would take its place. There's so many instances when

I basically worked as an R troubleshooter in a Pharmaceutical company, and honestly I wish python or Julia would take its place. There's so many instances when R would return a nonsense answer rather than fail, but you wouldn't realise until you did a deep dive of someone's code.

fastaguy88 5y ago
It would be so easy to write a very similar article on why clinical laboratories show NOT use 'R' in their analyses. I use 'R' extensively for data presentation, but I am constantly bitten by plots that look great, but do not in fact represent the data, because of some weird "factor" issue. I have never used a language where it is so easy to get beautiful results that are wrong. 'R' has very limited error checking, if it can figure out a way to do something (incorrectly), it's happy to do it. With its hidden 'statefulness' and tricky 'factor' effects, it would be a disaster in the clinical setting. Clinical labs need languages and procedures that will fail, rather than present an incorrect result. Unfortunately, 'R' does the opposite.
vixen99 5y ago
So the question is, who was writing the code and why were they so evidently incompetent? Easy for anyone to pick up a bit of R and start working with it. Thus it's hardly surprising to find the situation you describe. Why weren't these folk put through a rigorous course before being let loose in a pharmaceutical company of all places? Hardly their fault unless they exaggerated their skills.
- 41b696ef1113 5y ago
  My goto resource on this would be aRrgh which goes through some of the many rough edges of the language. Silent failures and data type castings can bite even those experienced in the language. R is a data analysis DSL that also happens to be a full programming language. [0] http://arrgh.tim-smith.us/ http://arrgh.tim-smith.us/
- fastaguy88 5y ago
  While your standards could be different from mine, I don’t think that all programmers who fail to write perfect code the first time are incompetent. Many competent programmers are not perfect, and rely on error messages and debuggers to produce correct code. Unfortunately, R does often fails to give the information required to find bugs.
eigenspace 5y ago
So many dynamic languages take this strange ethos of never wanting to throw an error and instead just guessing what the programmer meant and just doing something wacky instead of throwing an error. It's a real problem.

fastaguy88 5y ago

It would be so easy to write a very similar article on why clinical laboratories show NOT use 'R' in their analyses. I use 'R' extensively for data presentation, but I am constantly bitten by plots that look great, but do not in fact represent the data, because of some weird "factor" issue. I have never used a language where it is so easy to get beautiful results that are wrong. 'R' has very limited error checking, if it can figure out a way to do something (incorrectly), it's happy to do it. With its hidden 'statefulness' and tricky 'factor' effects, it would be a disaster in the clinical setting. Clinical labs need languages and procedures that will fail, rather than present an incorrect result. Unfortunately, 'R' does the opposite.

vixen99 5y ago

So the question is, who was writing the code and why were they so evidently incompetent? Easy for anyone to pick up a bit of R and start working with it. Thus it's hardly surprising to find the situation you describe. Why weren't these folk put through a rigorous course before being let loose in a pharmaceutical company of all places? Hardly their fault unless they exaggerated their skills.

41b696ef1113 5y ago
My goto resource on this would be aRrgh which goes through some of the many rough edges of the language. Silent failures and data type castings can bite even those experienced in the language. R is a data analysis DSL that also happens to be a full programming language. [0] http://arrgh.tim-smith.us/ http://arrgh.tim-smith.us/
fastaguy88 5y ago
While your standards could be different from mine, I don’t think that all programmers who fail to write perfect code the first time are incompetent. Many competent programmers are not perfect, and rely on error messages and debuggers to produce correct code. Unfortunately, R does often fails to give the information required to find bugs.

eigenspace 5y ago

So many dynamic languages take this strange ethos of never wanting to throw an error and instead just guessing what the programmer meant and just doing something wacky instead of throwing an error. It's a real problem.