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For what it's worth many people feel similarly about R. R is great for people actively working in statistics research (I assume because that's what I'm always t
by fluidcruft 4y ago
For what it's worth many people feel similarly about R. R is great for people actively working in statistics research (I assume because that's what I'm always told). But for a lot of us who just want to do some analysis, it's constantly breaking and we've learned to default to just starting from scratch when we need to revisit something we did a few years ago. Or we figure out how to buy a commercial system.
- tylermw 4y agoR is not constantly breaking. R Core does a remarkable job ensuring backwards compatibility. There are only a few prominent examples of significant "breaking" behavior across decades of the language existing, and those can often be reverted by setting an option (e.g. `options(stringsAsFactors = TRUE)`). But backwards compatibility is the primary concern with any update to the R language or the packages maintained by R Core. Now, if you're thinking about changes introduced by a specific user-contributed package breaking your analysis, that can indeed be a problem. But that can't be blamed on the R language. And the main user-contributed R statistics packages that have been around for decades (such as lme4 or survival) are mature and stable.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]