A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R • Hacker News Board

Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#131

Post by jghn » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:10 AM UTC

extr wrote: post #19

HN is predisposed to hate R because everyone here is coming from a "real" programming context. Their concerns are generally valid, but they should keep in mind a lot of people using do not have a software development background and do not care that the language is not elegantly designed: they just want to get analytical work done. In that respect, R is far, far superior to Python. Even something as simple as installi…

I came from a "real" programming background. This was pre-Tidyverse. Learning R thoroughly was the best thing I could have ever done for my proglang understanding as all the weird things R had meant that every time I learned something new I could say "Oh, it's like X in R".

Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#132

Post by jghn » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:12 AM UTC

ScottBurson wrote: post #129

zrobotics wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I kind of want to agree with you, I just don't see a better alternative. Do you really want biochemists to have to deal with the horrors of C compilation? In production code I'm very glad my makefile tells clang to fail on absolutely anything, but is that the best we can do? Other commenters have pointed out ways to avoid dangerous things like integer division, but if you think R is hostile then please offer a…

> I just don't see a better alternative Julia?

The biggest Julia cheerleaders gave up years ago. That doesn't mean the language is dead but it's not a great sign for a niche lang

Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#133

Post by safgasCVS » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:22 AM UTC

maxander wrote: post #91

extr wrote: post #19

HN is predisposed to hate R because everyone here is coming from a "real" programming context. Their concerns are generally valid, but they should keep in mind a lot of people using do not have a software development background and do not care that the language is not elegantly designed: they just want to get analytical work done. In that respect, R is far, far superior to Python. Even something as simple as installi…

No, you are wrong. R is terrible , and especially so for non-professional programmers, and it is an absolute disaster for the applications where it routinely gets used, namely statistics for scientific applications. The reason is its strong tendency to fail silently (and, with RStudio, to frequently keep going even when it does fail.) As a result, people get garbage results without realizing , and if they're unlucky,…

R is fundamentally flawed. It tries to merge two highly conflicting goals: a productive analytics environment and a programming language.

To do the first really well means automating away many of the issues that would crop up in the second allowing R to 'just work'. Because of that nothing beats R for getting to an answer as fast as possible (not even Python) at the cost of making it more difficult to productionise a solution in pure R.

Given its huge popularity and free-nature the benefits clearly outweigh the costs by a large factor.

Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#134

Post by sdabdoub » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:28 AM UTC

newen wrote: post #107

Giroflex wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pip install library needs root Hmm, not really. It's actually advised against [1]. [1] - https://askubuntu.com/questions/802544/is-sudo-pip-install-s...

Pip install needs root on my ubuntu install, my lab's and university's old redhat servers and my windows for linux install. I've had to install anaconda python to get any real work done on all three systems. Anaconda works fine for me but I've not even had to think about anything to install packages in R.

try

    pip install --user

or virtualenvs

Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#135

Post by sdabdoub » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:34 AM UTC

digitalzombie wrote: post #115

I use R a lot and I have to say some of these comments are weird. 1. R and Lisp are hardly alike even if it was inspire by it. It's like saying Erlang and Prolog is very similar. If you want learn FP do it in Erlang, Lisp, Haskell, etc.. Don't do it in R, it's half baked. 2. R syntax is ugly with warts. But built in datatype like dataframe, factor type, NA (missing value notion) value, make this language much better…

Absolutely agree with #3. R is by far the most accepted and expected implementation language for statisticians. I remember reading a blog post where the author had submitted a manuscript to a statistics journal that ended up being rejected, in part, because he had implemented the code in julia instead of R.

I use python for most things, but there are so many packages that can only be found in R (especially in the bioinformatics world), so it becomes a necessity.

Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#136

Post by sdabdoub » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:36 AM UTC

curiousgal wrote: post #53

JVerstry wrote: post #16

I learned R coming from Java, Node, PHP and Python and I love it !!! It is awful as an application development programming language, but it was never designed for that purpose. It was designed for STATISTICS. Try to achieve advanced statistics with your traditional software engineer's preferred language and see which language you hate then. The only tricky R concepts to learn for newbies are: recycling, formulas and…

Any recommended ressources for Learning those concepts?

Hadley Wickham's R for Data Science[1] is a generally good starting reference.

[1] http://r4ds.had.co.nz/

Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#137

Post by yread » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:45 AM UTC

extr wrote: post #19

HN is predisposed to hate R because everyone here is coming from a "real" programming context. Their concerns are generally valid, but they should keep in mind a lot of people using do not have a software development background and do not care that the language is not elegantly designed: they just want to get analytical work done. In that respect, R is far, far superior to Python. Even something as simple as installi…

> install RStudio and are off to the races, with a helpful package installation GUI.

Unless the package needs a native component like libcurl of particular version then it can turn into couple of hours of blindly trying everything you can think of.

> Another great example: in R, data types are pretty fungible, everything is a vector,

Unless it's a dataframe or factor or string or s3, s4 or s5 or a couple of other things.

And the documentation will tell you the reference paper that you can read and some completely impractical example.

Ugh, feels better now, sorry for the rant.

Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#138

Post by niceperson » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:48 AM UTC

I thought I was the only one who hated R. Guess not. I gave up trying to make a simple repreeeesentation when I couldn't find a tutorial on how to import data into R without using fucking excel.

Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#139

Post by itronitron » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:49 AM UTC

extr wrote: post #19

HN is predisposed to hate R because everyone here is coming from a "real" programming context. Their concerns are generally valid, but they should keep in mind a lot of people using do not have a software development background and do not care that the language is not elegantly designed: they just want to get analytical work done. In that respect, R is far, far superior to Python. Even something as simple as installi…

I am always amazed when I hear that people use Python in any type of production pipeline.

Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#140

Post by nzjrs » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 6:05 AM UTC

CJefferson wrote: post #72

Giroflex wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even something as simple as installing a library is a conceptual leap for these people (why wouldn't the software just come with everything needed to work?). > Have you ever tried explaining the various python package and environment management options to someone with a background in Excel/SQL? I don't understand the difficulty I've often seen voiced against this. Why would a newbie or someone who just wants to get…

Well pip install library needs root, which you probably don't have. So now you have to teach them about making, and acitvating, virtual environments. Also, they can't easily search through the packages in a nice GUI and just click on the one they want to install.

This is bad advice. Pip should be used in virtual environments, and not to install system packages