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ARrgh: A newcomer's (angry) guide to R
- jruohonen 3y ago"R is a shockingly dreadful language for an exceptionally useful data analysis environment. The more you learn about the R language, the worse it will feel. The development environment suffers from literally decades of accretion of stupid hacks from a community containing, to a first-order approximation, zero software engineers. R makes me want to kick things almost every time I use it." Care to elaborate why? Besides, all languages evolve and gather cruft.
- a2800276 3y agoThe entire website elaborates why. Since you quoted from the page, you must have seen that that is not the only sentence on the page AND that it links to further pages!
- jruohonen 3y agoSure; lots of cruft, I wouldn't disagree. But it is still strong and super fast when "prototyping" but only insofar you are doing floating point computations. Otherwise, Python is the choice for me when doing "data science" (for lack of a better word).
- jjgreen 3y agoSplendid rant All indexing in R is base-one. Note that no error is thrown if you try to access a[0]; it always returns an atomic vector of the same type but of length zero, written like numeric(0). Unaccountably, nobody's in jail for that decision, yet.
- a2800276 3y agoLovely, mirrors my feelings very closely, except I never took the time to write things down and have to frustratingly relearn every time I use R. Still love it though. And Hadley Wickham has to be the most productive and masochistic programmer on earth! He seems to be the only one keeping everything together...