5 ms·

Youre wrong. Python is outpacing R in usage. Every metric you can find proves it. R also has fundamental issues and lacks serious development.

• stoperaticless 2y ago
  s/serious/hyped
  • aydyn 2y ago
    No. R fundamentally has not really improved in the past ~10 years. Do you know much about how R works? Also try: gsub('serious', 'hyped', x)
    • lottin 2y ago
      Maybe because it already does what it intends to do reasonably well? I mean, what do you think needs to be improved?
      • smcin 2y ago
        Here are 14 years of HN discussions/criticisms of R: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=R%20language&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... "Does what it intends to do reasonably well" is going to be widely subjective, depending on whether the user's use-case is statistical/life-sciences vs more general purpose coding and relying on many packages; prototyping/experimentation vs production code; whether the user uses base-R, or tidyverse/data.table, etc. Here are two of those many posts: * An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language (July 5, 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362626 * The R programming language: The good, the bad, and the ugly (epatters.org, 2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35571659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35571659 -> https://www.epatters.org/post/r-lang/ https://www.epatters.org/post/r-lang/
      • aydyn 2y ago
        If youre unironically asserting that R already does everything well enough Im not going to take you seriously.
        • lottin 2y ago
          I'm asking what needs to be improved, in your opinion. That's a normal follow-up question that you should be able to answer. Otherwise, why are you even commenting?
          • aydyn 2y ago
            No you arent, youre clearly asking in a rhetorical way. Re-read your post. Any criticism brought up you'd dismiss. Heres one: lack of native 64 bit integers.
            • lottin 2y ago
              No, I was just asking out of curiosity. You're overthinking too much.
              • aydyn 2y ago
                No, you were clearly asserting that R already does everything needed. Stop trying to gaslight.
                • lottin 2y ago
                  You're crazy.
                  • dang 2y ago
                    Please don't cross into personal attack or name-calling, and please especially avoid this sort of tit-for-tat spat with another user. It's way against the site guidelines and makes for boring reading. I know it's not always easy to extricate oneself but it's helpful to remember that the only way to 'win' is to stop. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  • openrisk 2y ago
    The issue is that even if you peel the hype (which is a fact), python is still far larger. If you check e.g. the journal of open source software (which does not have much ML/AI bias), most of the papers are python, with an occasional R and julia submission.
• vixen99 2y ago
  Not to dispute because I have no idea so I'll assume you're correct. But how many metrics did you find and how were they obtained? And how would you know they are representative of all R users?
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    For whatever it is worth, the TIOBE index lists Python as #1, R at #21. Python is the first language many people are exposed to today. It has a library and tooling for every use case. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
    • kuhewa 2y ago
      R has a pretty particular use case though, Python use for statistical programming/data analysis would be an apples to apples comparison. People doing a coding 101 course in Python don't really count against the R user base.
      • aydyn 2y ago
        No one is disputing that R has usage in niche arenas.