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The bigger picture is the "democratization" of data science [1], not as an academic pursuit by white coat researchers (which was the main early use case for R)

The bigger picture is the "democratization" of data science [1], not as an academic pursuit by white coat researchers (which was the main early use case for R) but embedded in day-to-day operations in organizations of all sizes. "Apps" (web or mobile) is how this embedding is done. Reactivity is an important consideration when deploying a complex screen with many visible data elements and visualizations. The problem is how to increase the efficiency with which back-end developments (by technical people) get rolled-out to the end-user base. There are countless ways to do this of-course. The more technical resources one has available (e.g. knowledge of different stacks etc.), the more options. But when resources are scarce one is tempted to look for the (possibly only perceived) efficiency of a "full stack" approach. [1] a loose term which nevertheless reflects something very real: the widespread use of data in society for all sorts of purposes

RA_Fisher 2y ago
Cursed in your view because it’s not Python?
- openrisk 2y ago
  Python has not really solved this either... For one thing it barely exists on mobile.
- boccaff 2y ago
  When I've dealt with R in production, cursed meant: - Difficult to keep package versioning, even with "renv". - If an analyst decide to use a single function from the "tidyverse", you have a tons of dependencies. - Large docker images (1G+) due to packages like "devtools" and very large dependency tree for the "productivity packages" (see above). - Hard to communicate with the process. With luck, you can set it up and work with 'r-script' [1]. Without luck, stdout from process or simple files for io. In the end, to have a nice webapp, we ended up rewriting the R code into typescript. Julia don´t solve this also, as you have a hard time to set it up to communicate with other things. It seems that we can´t avoid the "2 or 3 languages" problem if you don´t use python. [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/r-script https://www.npmjs.com/package/r-script
  - RA_Fisher 2y ago
    Single functions and libraries can easily be imported in R, just like Python. It’s not necessary though, because the R community does a good job avoiding name conflicts (MASS aside). I think the core issue is that the coordination benefits of having everyone use Python are overestimated, and the benefit of better statistical tools in R and SWE skilling up in statistics is underestimated.
    - _Wintermute 2y ago
      > It’s not necessary though, because the R community does a good job avoiding name conflicts That has not at all been my experience. Loading the tidyverse pulls over 1000 things into your global namespace and clobbers several standard library functions in the process. Never mind that seemingly every single package has its own "filter" function. When you start getting different results based on the order you import packages it's usually a bad sign.
      - countrymile 2y ago
        Completely understand the annoyance of different results on order of package import. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/conflicted/ https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/conflicted/ goes some way to solving this.
      - egecant 2y ago
        Maybe its because you load tidyverse, which is a library of libraries, instead of loading only what you need? It seems like an issue related to your understanding of the tidyverse rather than R.
        _Wintermute 2y ago
        I understand the tidyverse perfectly well. Unfortunately it's become a habit of R users to import it at the top of every R script without thinking of the consequences of other users/maintainers.
      - 2y ago

RA_Fisher 2y ago

Cursed in your view because it’s not Python?

openrisk 2y ago
Python has not really solved this either... For one thing it barely exists on mobile.
boccaff 2y ago
When I've dealt with R in production, cursed meant: - Difficult to keep package versioning, even with "renv". - If an analyst decide to use a single function from the "tidyverse", you have a tons of dependencies. - Large docker images (1G+) due to packages like "devtools" and very large dependency tree for the "productivity packages" (see above). - Hard to communicate with the process. With luck, you can set it up and work with 'r-script' [1]. Without luck, stdout from process or simple files for io. In the end, to have a nice webapp, we ended up rewriting the R code into typescript. Julia don´t solve this also, as you have a hard time to set it up to communicate with other things. It seems that we can´t avoid the "2 or 3 languages" problem if you don´t use python. [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/r-script https://www.npmjs.com/package/r-script
- RA_Fisher 2y ago
  Single functions and libraries can easily be imported in R, just like Python. It’s not necessary though, because the R community does a good job avoiding name conflicts (MASS aside). I think the core issue is that the coordination benefits of having everyone use Python are overestimated, and the benefit of better statistical tools in R and SWE skilling up in statistics is underestimated.
  - _Wintermute 2y ago
    > It’s not necessary though, because the R community does a good job avoiding name conflicts That has not at all been my experience. Loading the tidyverse pulls over 1000 things into your global namespace and clobbers several standard library functions in the process. Never mind that seemingly every single package has its own "filter" function. When you start getting different results based on the order you import packages it's usually a bad sign.
    - countrymile 2y ago
      Completely understand the annoyance of different results on order of package import. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/conflicted/ https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/conflicted/ goes some way to solving this.
    - egecant 2y ago
      Maybe its because you load tidyverse, which is a library of libraries, instead of loading only what you need? It seems like an issue related to your understanding of the tidyverse rather than R.
      - _Wintermute 2y ago
        I understand the tidyverse perfectly well. Unfortunately it's become a habit of R users to import it at the top of every R script without thinking of the consequences of other users/maintainers.
    - 2y ago