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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

#31

Post by atheriel »

Most of these tidyverse vs. data.table arguments end up sounding a bit irrelevant to me. They tend to focus on syntax, which is largely down to preference, or performance, which is really only important once in a while. And they seem oddly focused on the need to choose one or the other, when it seems obvious that all are good choices with various tradeoffs.

I tried my hand at saying something more original about this debate recently: https://unconj.ca/blog/for-and-against-data-table.html

On the other hand, it's nice to see some criticism of RStudio and Hadley, even if it does stray into the conspiratorial. They've done a lot for the R community, but they do have some obvious blind spots.

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

#32

Post by educationdata »

cwyers wrote: post #29
educationdata wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're better at writing/composing dplyr, you can often make up the speed difference between the two in terms of the savings in time spent writing and reading code. dplyr syntax is definitely more concise and readable than base R, but comparing to data.table I don't think it has any advantage in terms of saving time writing or reading code.

I think the article sort of punts on providing examples of a complicated set of operations on a data frame. dplyr's author provides what I think is a good example of the differences between data.table and dplyr on a reasonably complex problem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21435339/data-table-vs-d... I feel like the first example is far more readable than the second. People can disagree on this, but the adoptio…

The second example should be written like this:

  diamondsDT[cut != "Fair", .(AvgPrice = mean(price),
                              MedianPrice = as.numeric(median(price)),
                              Count = .N), cut][order(-Count)]
There is no need to break it to 10 lines.

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

#33

Post by epistasis »

Bootvis wrote: post #5
kickout wrote: 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.

The "not a real language" critique often comes from those without any knowledge of Scheme; "real" languages are like C# or Java, and maybe Python, even though the lisp-like properties of Python are not so much appreciated. As C# and Java have gotten more functional aspects over the years, I've seen less and less of the "not a real language" criticism.

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

#34

Post by cwyers »

A friend pointed out to me that the author a few weeks ago put out a Python versus R comparison where he makes the rather incredible claim that the addition of some opinionated packages in the R ecosystem is more disunifying than the 2.7 to 3.x split in Python:

https://github.com/matloff/R-vs.-Python-for-Data-Science

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

#36

Post by erikpukinskis »

kickout wrote: post #7
Bootvis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For what it’s worth, I am a JavaScript programmer and I feel like HN shits on JS All. The. Time. Some people just like to shit on languages.

I think it’s just insecurity. They worry a lot about whether they’re a good enough developer, so they try hard to be on the “most advanced” platform they can figure out, and then need to talk down to the other platforms.

Secure, talented, older developers, in my experience, tend to be open to whatever technology is most appropriate. They have confidence in their ability to learn new things. And see the good traits of any tech, as well as the bad one—a necessary skill if you’re going to be the kind of developer who can make traction in any situation.

The platform fetishists can only really work from inside their special tower.

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

#38

Post by kgwgk »

nerdponx wrote: post #25
Bootvis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The R standard library is kind of weird and hard to use for "general purpose" programming. It's very clearly a domain specific language. Also, it's unbelievably slow for basic operations like looping, function calls, and variable assignment. It's literally orders of magnitude slower than Python (I've tested it). Unlike its fellow C-flavored-Lisp Javascript, R retains an extreme level of homoiconicity, Which apparentl…

Are you aware of Radford Neal’s pqR? https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/

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

#39

Post by uptownfunk »

I guess I am what you would call an R power user.

What’s really crazy is I never realized how fast and easy excel pivot tables were to work with.

I know I know it sounds ridiculous.

But if you do a lot data splicing and dicing, excel can actually get your cuts out way faster through pivot tables than writing R code.

So if you use R for almost everything, give Excel a try as well. And the nice thing is this is even more powerful if you work with non data science folks, because then you can say I just did this in excel (where excel skills should be required by everyone in the company, and R for the data scientists) and they’ll probably just leave you alone the next time they need something since they will try to do it in excel first.

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

#40

Post by lottin »

nerdponx wrote: post #25
Bootvis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The R standard library is kind of weird and hard to use for "general purpose" programming. It's very clearly a domain specific language. Also, it's unbelievably slow for basic operations like looping, function calls, and variable assignment. It's literally orders of magnitude slower than Python (I've tested it). Unlike its fellow C-flavored-Lisp Javascript, R retains an extreme level of homoiconicity, Which apparentl…

To say that R is a domain-specific language is hardly a criticism, though. It was designed to be domain-specific from the start.
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