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Folks bashing PHP like it's crap but praising any crappy thing if it's built with an esoteric lisp-based language. I mean, if you're starting out, chances are y

Folks bashing PHP like it's crap but praising any crappy thing if it's built with an esoteric lisp-based language. I mean, if you're starting out, chances are you're better off with js/py or even go but in the end you're paid for the types of problems you solve, not by the language you use... It just turns out that some problems are easier in this or that language, or even people who are good at solving this or that problem just happen to use an specific language (like the bioinformatics people using R when they could have used py).

noiwillnot 5y ago
R is another language that it is bashed constantly, but it is generally much productive in its field (EDA and stats on structured data) than the alternatives like Python.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  This. While I'm not sure I'd build a website or something with R, for pretty much anything data related R is a first choice. Even for big data on clusters or something. It's absolutely amazing at what it does. Super easy Fortran and C++ interop. Bonus that it's well enough known in academia and fields like statistics or economics.
  - dagw 5y ago
    I'm not sure I'd build a website or something with R Have you played with Shiny (shiny.rstudio.com). If you're building a website for interactive data exploration and analysis, it is very hard to beat.
    - Mikeb85 5y ago
      I have. Guess I haven't tried to build something bigger with it. Seemed to me to be mostly something to share visualisations, not for building say, a whole CRUD site Rails or Django-style.
      - cardosof 5y ago
        You're right - in my experience it's great for, say, creating an online calculator/simulator for something specific but it too fast becomes difficult when you started trying to add features like SSO, persistence etc.
- CornCobs 5y ago
  Absolutely agreed! You can feel that R was made for its specific use case. Exploration, visualization, experimentation and modeling just __click__ for me in R in a way Python can never inspire. In the Python ML world only the matrix libraries - numpy and similar APIs like torch.tensor and jax feel natural and click in my brain. The rest - data frame, visualization, scientific libraries; I'm not very sure how to explain it, but it always feels like some context switch is needed between using Python the language, and calling out to these libraries.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
The thing people forget about most is the LAMP stack. Although before node.js, PHP was simply a viable cost saving language to use. Now that WordPress moved to node however, it doesn't seem worthwhile to learn unless there are special uses you can get out of it. But I agree with you about the whole "esoteric lisp-based language" comment. It seems like every other day I see something like that here and all I wanna say is "why?" I mean nobody cares about lisp except for the stallman-esque nerds. The best programming language is the cheapest one to create, support, and replace others with. Not cause some random programmer that thinks they know what they're talking about because they don't like it.

noiwillnot 5y ago

R is another language that it is bashed constantly, but it is generally much productive in its field (EDA and stats on structured data) than the alternatives like Python.

Mikeb85 5y ago
This. While I'm not sure I'd build a website or something with R, for pretty much anything data related R is a first choice. Even for big data on clusters or something. It's absolutely amazing at what it does. Super easy Fortran and C++ interop. Bonus that it's well enough known in academia and fields like statistics or economics.
- dagw 5y ago
  I'm not sure I'd build a website or something with R Have you played with Shiny (shiny.rstudio.com). If you're building a website for interactive data exploration and analysis, it is very hard to beat.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    I have. Guess I haven't tried to build something bigger with it. Seemed to me to be mostly something to share visualisations, not for building say, a whole CRUD site Rails or Django-style.
    - cardosof 5y ago
      You're right - in my experience it's great for, say, creating an online calculator/simulator for something specific but it too fast becomes difficult when you started trying to add features like SSO, persistence etc.
CornCobs 5y ago
Absolutely agreed! You can feel that R was made for its specific use case. Exploration, visualization, experimentation and modeling just __click__ for me in R in a way Python can never inspire. In the Python ML world only the matrix libraries - numpy and similar APIs like torch.tensor and jax feel natural and click in my brain. The rest - data frame, visualization, scientific libraries; I'm not very sure how to explain it, but it always feels like some context switch is needed between using Python the language, and calling out to these libraries.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

The thing people forget about most is the LAMP stack. Although before node.js, PHP was simply a viable cost saving language to use. Now that WordPress moved to node however, it doesn't seem worthwhile to learn unless there are special uses you can get out of it. But I agree with you about the whole "esoteric lisp-based language" comment. It seems like every other day I see something like that here and all I wanna say is "why?" I mean nobody cares about lisp except for the stallman-esque nerds. The best programming language is the cheapest one to create, support, and replace others with. Not cause some random programmer that thinks they know what they're talking about because they don't like it.