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An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language

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Re: An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language

#3
Decent critiques in my opinion. I was trained on/learned base-R myself ~10 years ago and love the "tidyverse" (although the author is correct, data.table is superior for big data and its not particularly close). Can't imagine people that only know tidyr/dplyr/etc without knowing base-R, seems like those people would get exposed quickly.

I enjoy base-R solutions where I can. I use data.table when my data sets are medium-ism. But like most people, my data is small and people just call it big and thus the attraction to dplyr in particular. Those chained pipes are addicting.

Always love seeing R discussion on HN, seems to be taboo though (not a 'real' language and all that).

Re: An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language

#5
post #3

Decent critiques in my opinion. I was trained on/learned base-R myself ~10 years ago and love the "tidyverse" (although the author is correct, data.table is superior for big data and its not particularly close). Can't imagine people that only know tidyr/dplyr/etc without knowing base-R, seems like those people would get exposed quickly. I enjoy base-R solutions where I can. I use data.table when my data sets are medi…

I don’t even understand the not a real language critique, R:

- is based on scheme, a HN favourite;

- integrates very well with C++ through RCpp allowing you to do whatever you want. 9/10 times someone already went through the trouble for you.

Re: An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language

#7
post #5
post #3

Decent critiques in my opinion. I was trained on/learned base-R myself ~10 years ago and love the "tidyverse" (although the author is correct, data.table is superior for big data and its not particularly close). Can't imagine people that only know tidyr/dplyr/etc without knowing base-R, seems like those people would get exposed quickly. I enjoy base-R solutions where I can. I use data.table when my data sets are medi…

I don’t even understand the not a real language critique, R: - is based on scheme, a HN favourite; - integrates very well with C++ through RCpp allowing you to do whatever you want. 9/10 times someone already went through the trouble for you.

I agree; which is why I generally get confused when I see that criticism. This is only an assumption though; maybe its just a vocal minority that don't like R or I only notice the negative comments. Who knows

Re: An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language

#8
One reason dplyr was promoted is that you can connect to different server backend like sparkr, sql etc, which is the enterprise direction RStudio aiming at. In the other hand, data.table is your friend when you are using your own machine. With more and more memory and cpu power available, its benefits are actually increasing.

I have been using data.table from almost day one, it does worth more recognition. The syntax is a little bit hard in the beginning but can be grasped after some efforts. I often feel that my exploration code will be much more tedious look if written in dplyr style.

Re: An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language

#10
post #5
post #3

Decent critiques in my opinion. I was trained on/learned base-R myself ~10 years ago and love the "tidyverse" (although the author is correct, data.table is superior for big data and its not particularly close). Can't imagine people that only know tidyr/dplyr/etc without knowing base-R, seems like those people would get exposed quickly. I enjoy base-R solutions where I can. I use data.table when my data sets are medi…

I don’t even understand the not a real language critique, R: - is based on scheme, a HN favourite; - integrates very well with C++ through RCpp allowing you to do whatever you want. 9/10 times someone already went through the trouble for you.

I don't think there's any shame in R effectively being a good, productive DSL for a lot of stats and viz work, built around fast stuff written in C++. I also think this is largely true of a lot of Python as well, tbh. In the future my hope is that projects like Arrow end up with even more of the workload being taken off R's shoulders.
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