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I have a colleague that use R as a general purpose language (I'm in science), and it's horrible. He runs into problems all the time and usually the answer is "m
by mbreese 5y ago
I have a colleague that use R as a general purpose language (I'm in science), and it's horrible. He runs into problems all the time and usually the answer is "more RAM".
For the things it's good at, it's great. For everything else I avoid it like the plague. More often I find it easier to use a quick Python script to generate a data table that I can then read into R to perform whatever stats or plots I need. It's almost always faster than if I had just run everything in R to begin with.
But I think your description is spot-on. Non programmers just want to get something done and if it works in R, then great. For those of us that think in terms of software engineering, good practices can be difficult in R.
The vanilla-R vs Tidyverse split has made this all worse too. These are two completely separate dialects of R that while still the same language, are completely different.
It's like the R folks took the "there's more than one way to do it" mentality from perl and said "challenge accepted!".
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y agoI agree overall. In my particular case, my employer won't let me have Python for fear I will do things with it. But it is perfectly ok for me to RStudio with 2 million useful extensions that will do similar things. For better or worse, sometimes the tools we use are the tools we are left with. And I am saying this as a recent RStudio convert. I love how easy it makes some otherwise hard things. I hate the sheer amount of hoops you have to jump through to make some stuff work. But it works and I am definitely not an engineer.