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> community where discussions usually end up in someone getting told what they did was obviously wrong. Fascinating how that problem never appears in the prog
by eshvk 12y ago
> community where discussions usually end up in someone getting told what they did was obviously wrong.
Fascinating how that problem never appears in the programming community. How we never have a situation where a user is told that they are obviously wrong. /end snark.
Having said that, I sympathize with where you are coming from. However, you have to realize a few things:
1. R comes from a community designed to create things that are correct, a community where data is typically cleaned and small enough that sophisticated mathematical models exist. Most large data set + large sophisticated models problems can be broken down into test in R and then write C++ code.
2. On the cryptic function names, there is an element of inspiration from Mathematical symbology, it makes it easier to take a proof and turn into code.
3. Yeah, I got nothing on the data types. They confuse me as fuck as well.
4. R has ggplot2. This is amazing. I am a firm believer that a data scientist is nothing if they can't visualize their data. And yet, nothing comes close to ggplot2. This comes from a guy who will grab an ML engineer and talk their head off on the joys of d3.
Now having said that, I do hope for another great language to emerge. The closest for me has been Matlab, second best numpy. Somehow a paid software really fucking incentivizes people to clean their shit and make a solid product. (Well solid enough for my purposes).
- StefanKarpinski 12y ago> Fascinating how that problem never appears in the programming community. How we never have a situation where a user is told that they are obviously wrong. /end snark. This is a huge problem all over programming communities. However, R is reputed to be significantly worse than most. We're trying very hard to innovate not only with Julia's technology, but also with its community. There is no reason for open source programming projects to be "jerkdoms" – we're professionals and our behavior should be professional, civil, helpful, and respectful. Even if we weren't professionals, that's still just decent behavior. If you need evidence of a civil, non-snarky, supportive community look no further than this: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/6829 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/6829 A more typical issue interaction is this: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/6769 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/6769 This is now the longest issue discussion Julia has ever had, and a fairly divisive one (although a bit obscure), but entirely civil, polite, and respectful. > nothing comes close to ggplot2. IMO, Gadfly does: http://dcjones.github.io/Gadfly.jl/ http://dcjones.github.io/Gadfly.jl/ – of course, it's very heavily inspired by ggplot2 and uses D3 for plotting in the browser.