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> somehow it managed to become the official language of statistics research There's zero mystery to this. The intended audience is people that want to get stuf

> somehow it managed to become the official language of statistics research There's zero mystery to this. The intended audience is people that want to get stuff done. Professional software developers commenting on R are like this: "He's such a good salesman. He does everything the right way. He dresses right. He talks right. He has the best smile of any salesman I've ever seen. He fills out his reports on time. Granted, he doesn't make many sales, but why would you hire one of those other guys over someone that's perfect?"

Grimm1 5y ago
Mmmm more like like they try to put the salesman in an operations role and wonder why the company has broken down. If you tried to use R for an actual engineering project you'd wind up with a system that is always on fire. Where as these one off analysis it's fine because it's just a one off. We want to get stuff done too, but we need it to hold up for more than a few hours so that's the mode we think in.
- bachmeier 5y ago
  Every HN discussion: I do real programming. Everyone else works on toy problems.
  - Grimm1 5y ago
    It's all real programming and it has all the real consequences, but there is a distinction between something that needs to live for a day, a few months, maybe years and then maybe have multiple people work on it, have it communicate with other systems or not and the level of investment and structure you need to put into a system to make sure that's possible. Programming has a very low barrier to entry and that is incredibly powerful but there is a big gap between someone writing one off scripts to solve immediate problems and people writing highly connected systems that withstand scrutiny. I've always personally been for accreditation for software engineers much like pretty much every other engineering discipline.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    He wasn't calling that one-off use case a toy, just that it's a different world than most of the people here on HN function in.
  - unishark 5y ago
    they used to split stuff like R off into the "scripting" category. But now most "real programmers" are apparently doing python or javascript so that little hierarchy quietly disappeared.

Grimm1 5y ago

Mmmm more like like they try to put the salesman in an operations role and wonder why the company has broken down. If you tried to use R for an actual engineering project you'd wind up with a system that is always on fire. Where as these one off analysis it's fine because it's just a one off. We want to get stuff done too, but we need it to hold up for more than a few hours so that's the mode we think in.

bachmeier 5y ago
Every HN discussion: I do real programming. Everyone else works on toy problems.
- Grimm1 5y ago
  It's all real programming and it has all the real consequences, but there is a distinction between something that needs to live for a day, a few months, maybe years and then maybe have multiple people work on it, have it communicate with other systems or not and the level of investment and structure you need to put into a system to make sure that's possible. Programming has a very low barrier to entry and that is incredibly powerful but there is a big gap between someone writing one off scripts to solve immediate problems and people writing highly connected systems that withstand scrutiny. I've always personally been for accreditation for software engineers much like pretty much every other engineering discipline.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  He wasn't calling that one-off use case a toy, just that it's a different world than most of the people here on HN function in.
- unishark 5y ago
  they used to split stuff like R off into the "scripting" category. But now most "real programmers" are apparently doing python or javascript so that little hierarchy quietly disappeared.