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Learn R Through Examples (2020)

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Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)

#21

Post by xiaodai »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #15

Lot's of negative comments in here about learning R from experienced programmers. I've found this is largely because experienced programmers have this unjustified bias that R is some toy language that should be easy to learn and has nothing to teach them. If you approached a language like Rust in the same way you would likely be just as frustrated with it. Certainly R has its quirks, but most of this comes from being…

NSE is what will do experiences programmer's head in. It's an interesting feature.

Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)

#22

Post by xiaodai »

temp8964 wrote: post #10

I recently tried to migrate my R code to Julia. Even though I already knew R data.table is faster than DataFrames.jl, I was totally blown away by how slow Julia is. So I quickly gave up. I think I will have to write unavoidable hard loop in cpp, which I really don't want to do...

yeah. time to first plot (ttfp) is a real issue.

Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)

#23

Post by foxes »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #15

Lot's of negative comments in here about learning R from experienced programmers. I've found this is largely because experienced programmers have this unjustified bias that R is some toy language that should be easy to learn and has nothing to teach them. If you approached a language like Rust in the same way you would likely be just as frustrated with it. Certainly R has its quirks, but most of this comes from being…

I find it highly unlikely that learning R will expand your programming views anywhere near Haskell.

Haskell is an advanced functional programming language. Most R stuff seems to be incoherent, hard to verify correctness, hacky. It does not seem built on a solid foundation like Haskell. Truly everything being a vector is not a huge take away.

As for "here's just a bunch of examples", well that seems sort of a brute force way to learn something. I agree examples are important, but they are usually to back something up. Having to reverse engineer some fundamental ideas out of just examples is more work. Seems like this is just promoting more hackyness. Seems like its training a neural network instead of actually understanding something.

Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)

#24

Post by auto »

CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #6
auto wrote: post #4

I consider myself a pretty experienced developer/software engineer/whatever. Decade into my career, started in iOS in Obj-C, learned Swift along the way, eventually migrated to the backend with Java/SQL, and finally found myself where I really wanted to be, embedded doing C/C++ work for a household name. That said, about halfway through my master's about two years ago, I found myself in an intro to data mining course…

> All I remember from that class is hours every week googling unreadable python pukes from R studio (because apparently everything data mining/ML related in R is actually just python) I’m curious what libraries you were using, I’ve had to go into the source of quite a few popular libraries and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered Python. Lots of C and it’s derivatives, lots of Stan and FORTRAN, but I don’t think I’ve…

Just going back and looking through some of the homework, here's what I'm seeing imported:

readr, caret, lattice, ggplot2, RColorBrewer, mlbench, ElemStatLearn, klaR, dplyr, arules, arulesViz, tensorflow

Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)

#25

Post by malshe »

auto wrote: post #4

I consider myself a pretty experienced developer/software engineer/whatever. Decade into my career, started in iOS in Obj-C, learned Swift along the way, eventually migrated to the backend with Java/SQL, and finally found myself where I really wanted to be, embedded doing C/C++ work for a household name. That said, about halfway through my master's about two years ago, I found myself in an intro to data mining course…

> because apparently everything data mining/ML related in R is actually just python

I think it is apparent only to you. The most popular package for ML in R is `caret` and it has nothing to do with Python. Similarly, `mlr` also has no Python. In fact, except for tensorflow and keras, I can't think of any major ML package that needs Python. Even torch package which brings pytorch to R doesn't need Python (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/torch/index.html).

What confuses me even more is that you were learning statistics but using R packages that use Python as backend. In my experience, almost all the new statistics and econometrics methods are first released as R packages by the researchers. Can you name any data mining R packages that you used that required Python? I am really curious to know.

Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)

#26

Post by malshe »

auto wrote: post #24
CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I remember from that class is hours every week googling unreadable python pukes from R studio (because apparently everything data mining/ML related in R is actually just python) I’m curious what libraries you were using, I’ve had to go into the source of quite a few popular libraries and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered Python. Lots of C and it’s derivatives, lots of Stan and FORTRAN, but I don’t think I’ve…

Just going back and looking through some of the homework, here's what I'm seeing imported: readr, caret, lattice, ggplot2, RColorBrewer, mlbench, ElemStatLearn, klaR, dplyr, arules, arulesViz, tensorflow

In this list only tensorflow requires Python

Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)

#27

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

auto wrote: post #24
CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I remember from that class is hours every week googling unreadable python pukes from R studio (because apparently everything data mining/ML related in R is actually just python) I’m curious what libraries you were using, I’ve had to go into the source of quite a few popular libraries and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered Python. Lots of C and it’s derivatives, lots of Stan and FORTRAN, but I don’t think I’ve…

Just going back and looking through some of the homework, here's what I'm seeing imported: readr, caret, lattice, ggplot2, RColorBrewer, mlbench, ElemStatLearn, klaR, dplyr, arules, arulesViz, tensorflow

Yeah tensor flow is python, and is a nightmare to work with.

That's not Rs fault though

Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)

#28

Post by Closi »

I currently do lots of data analysis in excel and know basic Python. I would be interested to get opinions on if R is better suited to data analysis than python if that’s all I was doing.

Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)

#29

Post by acomjean »

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #18

R plus the tidyverse is what makes it a great language. Some tidyverse concepts are being baked into base R, like the pipe, but base R by itself feels hollow. R’s future is inseparable from the tidyverse. We need to just lump them together in any serious discussion of R. I teach a graduate level R course mainly for economics and statistics majors. (My educational background and career are computer science and technic…

For those that don’t know the “tidyverse” is a set of R packages that make using base R much easier/better (in my opinion)

https://www.tidyverse.org/ There is also a free ebook that’s a good reference.

ggplot2 the plotting package included is pretty awesome

I took a biostatistics class and after the basic examples in R using the tidyverse to analyze data for projects was very helpful.

Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)

#30

Post by vasili111 »

specproc wrote: post #2

R is such a horrible language to learn. I gave up entirely and now just use rpy2 for the few things it can do that Python can't.

Have you tried to read R book? Lots of people are learning from videos, tutorials and etc and that is not a good approach to learn R.
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