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Despite constantly reading on this website that R is bad or wrong, I somehow manage to get all of my data work done quicker and with fewer headaches than excel,

Despite constantly reading on this website that R is bad or wrong, I somehow manage to get all of my data work done quicker and with fewer headaches than excel, sas, or Python.

qqqwwweeerrr 5y ago
I hear the complaint that R is a terrible language mainly from professional programmers. I'm sure it is poorly designed from a computer science perspective, but there is no programming language out there which makes it so easy to run any model under the sun as does R.
- Someone 5y ago
  I think that’s not a feature of the language, but of its libraries. R is popular for similar reasons why it’s so hard to replace python. In Python’s case, the language isn’t bad, but the implementation is horrible for performance. It sits on the back of lots of fast C/Fortran/whatever code, and polished the (relative) turd a lot, making the end result quite usable, but the “sitting on top of part” also makes it hard to improve the performance of the implementation. For both R and python the end result is good, but they still are local optima in the space of what is possible.
  - wcerfgba 5y ago
    I've had the opposite experience. My preferred programming style is functional. My current gig has been in Clojure, and I couldn't ask for a better product programming language. I find Python code very difficult to write in a functional way (even the official howto is littered with for loops [1]), but in R I can feel an underlying lispiness, and the pipe operator `%>%` from magittr is really nice: whereas in Clojure there is `->`, `->>` and `as->` for thread-first, thread-last, and named threading respectively, in R with `%>%` I get thread-first as the default and I can override it by placing `.` wherever I want in the downstream function calls. [1] https://docs.python.org/3/howto/functional.html https://docs.python.org/3/howto/functional.html
rich_sasha 5y ago
From memory, R is quite slow, and has syntax I found really ugly. Dots as part of names (my.variable), $ for member access, operators wrapped in % for pointwise operations, eg %*% for pointwise multiplication. These probably shouldn’t matter but did for me. FWIW the statistical offering was fantastic.

Despite constantly reading on this website that R is bad or wrong, I somehow manage to get all of my data work done quicker and with fewer headaches than excel, sas, or Python.

qqqwwweeerrr 5y ago

I hear the complaint that R is a terrible language mainly from professional programmers. I'm sure it is poorly designed from a computer science perspective, but there is no programming language out there which makes it so easy to run any model under the sun as does R.

Someone 5y ago
I think that’s not a feature of the language, but of its libraries. R is popular for similar reasons why it’s so hard to replace python. In Python’s case, the language isn’t bad, but the implementation is horrible for performance. It sits on the back of lots of fast C/Fortran/whatever code, and polished the (relative) turd a lot, making the end result quite usable, but the “sitting on top of part” also makes it hard to improve the performance of the implementation. For both R and python the end result is good, but they still are local optima in the space of what is possible.
- wcerfgba 5y ago
  I've had the opposite experience. My preferred programming style is functional. My current gig has been in Clojure, and I couldn't ask for a better product programming language. I find Python code very difficult to write in a functional way (even the official howto is littered with for loops [1]), but in R I can feel an underlying lispiness, and the pipe operator `%>%` from magittr is really nice: whereas in Clojure there is `->`, `->>` and `as->` for thread-first, thread-last, and named threading respectively, in R with `%>%` I get thread-first as the default and I can override it by placing `.` wherever I want in the downstream function calls. [1] https://docs.python.org/3/howto/functional.html https://docs.python.org/3/howto/functional.html

rich_sasha 5y ago

From memory, R is quite slow, and has syntax I found really ugly. Dots as part of names (my.variable), $ for member access, operators wrapped in % for pointwise operations, eg %*% for pointwise multiplication. These probably shouldn’t matter but did for me. FWIW the statistical offering was fantastic.