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In my case, I found R a better tool for learning DS, as it is more or less, a DSL for statistics, and feels more low level and fores you to learn more fundament
by SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
In my case, I found R a better tool for learning DS, as it is more or less, a DSL for statistics, and feels more low level and fores you to learn more fundamentals than python. For production it is probably worse tan python, true.
- Cosi1125 3y agoIt's not a DSL.
- SomeoneFromCA 3y agoIt is de facto.
- Cosi1125 3y agoWhy do you think that? (I'm legitimately curious.)
- nequo 3y agoNot parent and I also consider R to be a surprisingly solid general purpose PL but the one reason that I can think of is that formulas are part of the language. Formulas are extremely well-suited for data analysis but odd outside of that.
- Cosi1125 3y agoGood point. I'd add complex numbers and "everything is a vector" to that. Of course that doesn't make it a DSL. It simply means that R was designed with a particular application in mind. So was Perl (regular expressions as first-class citizens) or Javascript (DOM manipulation). Not to mention PHP.
- nequo 3y agoThat is true. Also Erlang with the actor model, and Go with its goroutines for network services.
- SomeoneFromCA 3y agoThis is why I said "de facto", not "by design". Yes, you can use it outside stats domain, but it will suck big time for that. PHP used to be like that as well, but later versions look more usable for general scripting.
- SomeoneFromCA 3y agoNo R is not a "surprisingly solid general purpose PL". Not in comparison to better option such as Ruby, Python, Perl etc.
- nequo 3y agoBut yes in comparison to Stata which is its main competitor in the space where I am using it. This does make it possible to write much more modular, legible, and well-tested R code than Stata do files.