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I agree that R isn't ideal, and a proper programming language is preferable to both. Which one of course will depend on the domain, but proper control over floa

by corty 5y ago

I agree that R isn't ideal, and a proper programming language is preferable to both. Which one of course will depend on the domain, but proper control over float precision, fixed-point arithmetics, bignum and debuggability isn't good in R either. It's just that R is still far above Excel.

fighterpilot 5y ago
I mostly agree, but at least Excel is more easily inspectable by a human, which makes a certain class of errors (specifically, silly logic bugs) less likely to get through.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  It's not obvious to me that Excel is more easibly inspectable, can you say more? To me, R seems more easily inspectable, as all the logic of a program is visible just by looking at text files, where in Excel it's hidden "under the surface", you have to click on cells, look at what's there, go click on other cells that relate to it, remember what you were looking at in the first one that's now invisible, etc.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    It's the visualization of logic that I'm thinking of. You can press F2 on a cell and visually see what data is being pulled into the function, and you can easily manually check that that single calculation is accurate by re-creating that calculation by hand, and then infer that all the other stuff in the column is also accurate. For anything very complicated though, I'd prefer R, as Excel eventually gets unwieldy. Although, I'm saying that from the perspective of being a reasonably experienced coder. The majority of the population should just use Excel, especially in a work context in non-technical teams. No matter how much you push for R, other people in the team aren't going to see the value and aren't going to go along with it, and your R code will be useless after you've left.
- corty 5y ago
  Not really. Logic in Excel is based on stuff like SUMIF( ...) which is totally unreadable without lots of context about the cell or range it refers to. If someone fumbled the fill command and some cell is missing the formula? You'll never know and the result will be automatically and silently zero. References to that result will just use the zero as input. Mixed fixed/nonfixed references like A$3? Unreadable and hard to understand. References per se? Unreadable because undescriptive, maybe there will be a column or field label, maybe there won't. Also, formulas are always hidden by default, you'll just get a sea of numbers. Calling Excel easily inspectable is laughably wrong imho. Just the opposite.
  - andy81 5y ago
    Data tables and keeping one tab per table solves all of those. Sounds more like an issue with the skill of average excel users than a feature gap.
dm319 5y ago
Why isn't R a proper programming language? What would you use over R for data analysis or statistical analysis? R has a beautiful functional ability based on S-expressions, allowing some clever stuff to be done (i.e. tidyverse), incredibly fast (data.table is faster than Python, Julia, Matlab etc).
- ivirshup 5y ago
  Can data.table play well with the tidyverse yet? And as a side note, I believe it's moving down the rankings in the h2o benchmarks [1]. [1]: https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/ https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/
  - dm319 5y ago
    Oh that's great. I'm really glad to see Julia getting faster there.

by corty 5y ago

fighterpilot 5y ago

I mostly agree, but at least Excel is more easily inspectable by a human, which makes a certain class of errors (specifically, silly logic bugs) less likely to get through.

jrochkind1 5y ago
It's not obvious to me that Excel is more easibly inspectable, can you say more? To me, R seems more easily inspectable, as all the logic of a program is visible just by looking at text files, where in Excel it's hidden "under the surface", you have to click on cells, look at what's there, go click on other cells that relate to it, remember what you were looking at in the first one that's now invisible, etc.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  It's the visualization of logic that I'm thinking of. You can press F2 on a cell and visually see what data is being pulled into the function, and you can easily manually check that that single calculation is accurate by re-creating that calculation by hand, and then infer that all the other stuff in the column is also accurate. For anything very complicated though, I'd prefer R, as Excel eventually gets unwieldy. Although, I'm saying that from the perspective of being a reasonably experienced coder. The majority of the population should just use Excel, especially in a work context in non-technical teams. No matter how much you push for R, other people in the team aren't going to see the value and aren't going to go along with it, and your R code will be useless after you've left.
corty 5y ago
Not really. Logic in Excel is based on stuff like SUMIF( ...) which is totally unreadable without lots of context about the cell or range it refers to. If someone fumbled the fill command and some cell is missing the formula? You'll never know and the result will be automatically and silently zero. References to that result will just use the zero as input. Mixed fixed/nonfixed references like A$3? Unreadable and hard to understand. References per se? Unreadable because undescriptive, maybe there will be a column or field label, maybe there won't. Also, formulas are always hidden by default, you'll just get a sea of numbers. Calling Excel easily inspectable is laughably wrong imho. Just the opposite.
- andy81 5y ago
  Data tables and keeping one tab per table solves all of those. Sounds more like an issue with the skill of average excel users than a feature gap.

dm319 5y ago

Why isn't R a proper programming language? What would you use over R for data analysis or statistical analysis? R has a beautiful functional ability based on S-expressions, allowing some clever stuff to be done (i.e. tidyverse), incredibly fast (data.table is faster than Python, Julia, Matlab etc).

ivirshup 5y ago
Can data.table play well with the tidyverse yet? And as a side note, I believe it's moving down the rankings in the h2o benchmarks [1]. [1]: https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/ https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/
- dm319 5y ago
  Oh that's great. I'm really glad to see Julia getting faster there.