4 ms·

I'm struggling to think of an aesthetic reason why SQL would be "good" yet R, "ugly".

k_sze 5y ago
I don’t know R but SQL is definitely ugly. There is no world in which listing the columns before the tables in a SELECT statement is a good idea. It makes intellisense/autocomplete awkward.
JackMorgan 5y ago
R has a lot of surprises built in and is fairly inconsistent. That makes it harder to fully learn (always have to pull up docs for everything). Also it means every so often I'll forget some weird edge case of a function and get a totally wrong result. For a certain class of work, this is fine: if you use it every day and are confident catching errata you'll learn all the weirdnesses. Many professional programmers work in a half dozen languages a week, so one that is significantly harder to learn will feel frustrating. For me it'll be actually slower to get the same result as other tools since I have to relearn its unique way of working.
j-pb 5y ago
SQL made relational programming possible, when computer were too slow to do declarative programming. The modern aproach would be something more highlevel/declarative like Datalog, but given the context SQL made a good tradeoff in terms of programmer control and declarativity. R is ugly because it encourages users to use it wrong. For loops are slow as a snail, but are what everybody uses and teaches, while the proper/fast way to wrangle data, with higher order functions like map, is hidden behind idiosyncratic names and obscure APIs. Even the creator of R considered making it a language instead of the scheme library that it started iut as, as a mistake.
- Someone 5y ago
  I think something like QBE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_by_Example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_by_Example; about as old as SQL) is the way to let non-programmers write queries.
  - marianoguerra 5y ago
    I'm working on that :) Instadeq: A Live Programming Environment for End User Data Analysis and Visualization Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTEkYqnGICE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTEkYqnGICE Slides: https://marianoguerra.github.io/presentations/2021-live/ https://marianoguerra.github.io/presentations/2021-live/
  - Nekorosu 5y ago
    Looks a lot like declarative logical programming language in disguise (Datalog, Prolog).
- jhbadger 5y ago
  I was a huge fan of xlispstat in the 1990s (which I've archived on Github at (https://github.com/jhbadger/xlispstat https://github.com/jhbadger/xlispstat), but the simple fact is that the majority of the statistics community just didn't like Lisp-like languages, and not only xlispstat, but newer projects like Incanter (statistics for Clojure) have pretty much failed as well. R meets its need far better than a Scheme library that nobody would have used. It's yet another example of "worse is better".

I don’t know R but SQL is definitely ugly. There is no world in which listing the columns before the tables in a SELECT statement is a good idea. It makes intellisense/autocomplete awkward.

JackMorgan 5y ago

R has a lot of surprises built in and is fairly inconsistent. That makes it harder to fully learn (always have to pull up docs for everything). Also it means every so often I'll forget some weird edge case of a function and get a totally wrong result. For a certain class of work, this is fine: if you use it every day and are confident catching errata you'll learn all the weirdnesses. Many professional programmers work in a half dozen languages a week, so one that is significantly harder to learn will feel frustrating. For me it'll be actually slower to get the same result as other tools since I have to relearn its unique way of working.

j-pb 5y ago

SQL made relational programming possible, when computer were too slow to do declarative programming. The modern aproach would be something more highlevel/declarative like Datalog, but given the context SQL made a good tradeoff in terms of programmer control and declarativity. R is ugly because it encourages users to use it wrong. For loops are slow as a snail, but are what everybody uses and teaches, while the proper/fast way to wrangle data, with higher order functions like map, is hidden behind idiosyncratic names and obscure APIs. Even the creator of R considered making it a language instead of the scheme library that it started iut as, as a mistake.

Someone 5y ago
I think something like QBE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_by_Example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_by_Example; about as old as SQL) is the way to let non-programmers write queries.
- marianoguerra 5y ago
  I'm working on that :) Instadeq: A Live Programming Environment for End User Data Analysis and Visualization Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTEkYqnGICE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTEkYqnGICE Slides: https://marianoguerra.github.io/presentations/2021-live/ https://marianoguerra.github.io/presentations/2021-live/
- Nekorosu 5y ago
  Looks a lot like declarative logical programming language in disguise (Datalog, Prolog).
jhbadger 5y ago
I was a huge fan of xlispstat in the 1990s (which I've archived on Github at (https://github.com/jhbadger/xlispstat https://github.com/jhbadger/xlispstat), but the simple fact is that the majority of the statistics community just didn't like Lisp-like languages, and not only xlispstat, but newer projects like Incanter (statistics for Clojure) have pretty much failed as well. R meets its need far better than a Scheme library that nobody would have used. It's yet another example of "worse is better".