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I think of Excel as a neat example of a rare local minimum in the great programming space. I think R gets to something close like this too. You can technicall
by terminalbraid 2y ago
I think of Excel as a neat example of a rare local minimum in the great programming space. I think R gets to something close like this too.
You can technically accomplish about any programming task you want in it, albeit with poor ergonomics for anything sufficiently complicated, and a small but real push in that area of work will lead you to use a more accepted form of "programming".
However, due to whatever environment, desired or perceived skillsets (or limitations), other pressures, people stay and remain with that local tooling minimum for things that should have outgrown it. If you ever meet an office's "excel person" you instantly understand this phenomena.
- MostlyStable 2y agoR is mostly benefiting from network effects. Everyone in the life sciences uses it (I think economists mostly use Statista and engineers/physicists seem to use a lot of MatLab?), which means that all the things that they need get R libraries (and blog posts explaining how to do them, and publications validating their use, etc.). And the way that academic scientists work mean that most of the downsides of R don't actually matter. I will completely agree with almost any list of deficiencies that you come up with for R. But I will disagree that almost anything on that list actually matters for an academic lab using it to conduct analyses. As for it's use outside of academia, I couldn't comment.
- williamcotton 2y agoI much prefer ggplot over other options!
- HPsquared 2y agoI'm an Excel person who is branching into PowerShell. Similar "no tools required" approach.
- jpc0 2y agoI mean... I have some spreadsheets that are pretty complicated and almost certainly could be a fully fledged program but, well it's already there and I don't need to figure out whatever framework / library I need to present the data as a PDF, excel already does that... I 100% get the appeal of excel for many tasks and realistically when used as a tool it is extremely powerful and removes a lot of things (like how to display the data) out of what I need to care about.