171–180 of 266 posts
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As though mistakes wouldn’t happen with non-programmers working in R.
In R, you can use accepted methods of software development and engineering, such as version control, automated testing, CI/CD to catch mistakes and prevent them from causing harm. In Excel? Not really.
If you need to do something once, use a GUI (Excel). If you need to do something ten times, use hotkeys and shortcuts. If you need to do something a hundred times, write a script (R). I usually use the command line as the example for why writing code and scripts are better than the more intuitive and lower-learning-curve GUIs. If I want to move a file from one folder to another then I just drag it across. Easy. If I…
> I want to move a thousand files beginning with 'UTR-77' and ending with '.csv' 1. Use a file manager with stable sorting [1] (I use Thunar which does this, but I suspect lots of file managers keep the sort order stable). 2. Sort by type. 3. Sort by name. 4. Select the first file named UTR-77. 5. Scroll to the last file, and Shift+Click it. 6. Cut then paste to your desired directory. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/…
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Also, if you need to do something (even once) and have to know how you did it three months later, write a script.
I usually save my command history to version control every time I git commit. It helps a lot for less frequently visited projects.
Other than that, I usually document some ops/quick read me about how to use or prepare the project
This week I got a bit more familiar with R while adding it as a scripting language for a data IDE I'm working on (it already supported other languages). It is a very hard language and community to get into! The documentation is very sparse. Library documentation is published as PDF (I guess?) and also very sparse. The default `print` behavior is pretty hard to understand. It's 1-indexed and it took me a while to real…
I highly recommend anybody getting into R to skip the base language (which indeed is ancient and full of gotchas) and go straight for the Tidyverse[1]. You can always go back in and learn how to do things the old way later. Over the last decade, the R community has largely standardized around tools like dplyr, ggplot, tibble, purrr, and so on that make doing data science work way easier to reason about. Much more erg…
Consider this example:
# base R
starwars[starwars$height % filter(
height Where'd `height` and `gender` come from in the dplyr version? They're just columns in a DF, not variables, and yet they act like variables... Well that's the dplyr magic baby!
dplyr (and other tidystuff) achieves this "niceness" by doing a whole bunch of what amounts to gnarly metaprogramming[1] -- that example was taken from a whole big chapter about "Tidy evalutation", describing how it does all this quote()-ing and eval()-ing under the hood to make the "nicer" version work. it's (arguably) more pleasant to read and write, but much harder to actually understand -- "easy, but not simple", to paraphrase a slightly tired phrase.
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[1] IIRC it works something like this. the expressions
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I mostly agree, but at least Excel is more easily inspectable by a human, which makes a certain class of errors (specifically, silly logic bugs) less likely to get through.
Not really. Logic in Excel is based on stuff like SUMIF( ...) which is totally unreadable without lots of context about the cell or range it refers to. If someone fumbled the fill command and some cell is missing the formula? You'll never know and the result will be automatically and silently zero. References to that result will just use the zero as input. Mixed fixed/nonfixed references like A$3? Unreadable and hard…
Sounds more like an issue with the skill of average excel users than a feature gap.
If you need to do something once, use a GUI (Excel). If you need to do something ten times, use hotkeys and shortcuts. If you need to do something a hundred times, write a script (R). I usually use the command line as the example for why writing code and scripts are better than the more intuitive and lower-learning-curve GUIs. If I want to move a file from one folder to another then I just drag it across. Easy. If I…
I often write a script even if I only have to do something twice. In this case, the point is not to save time, it's to be secure in the knowledge that I did the thing in exactly the same way both times, because it was the same script that did it both times. (And then it saves time anyway, because it turns out I had to do the thing 20 more times after all.)
Big big reason: R doesn't alter data without being asked to, Excel does so, silently, sneakily. Anything important should not be done in Excel. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/165042/stop-excel-from-a...
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> 5. Scroll to the last file, and Shift+Click it. With thousands of files, this won't be particularly fast or easy.
If you know how to use a scrollbar, it is fast and easy. Grab the thumb and drag it down. If you overshoot or have trouble landing on the last file, use the page up/down areas of the scrollbar or its up/down arrow to fine tune the scroll position. Should only take a few seconds. Another way is to hold down the Ctrl key and use the PgDn/PgUp keys to scroll. If you hold down Ctrl+PgDn you can whip through thousands of…
- Remotely accessing a system (terminal or GUI). - An overloaded system (GUI response is ... inconsisstent) - Remotely accessing a system from a touch-based device. An increasingly common scenario. - Walking someone through a process (text is unambiguous). - Repeated operations (something that has to be done multiple times, in multiple directories, on an ongoing basis, on a scheduled basis, reliably, consistently, provably, with documentation and debuggability).
Additionally, the scrollbar seems to be increasingly unpopular. I'm on record as not being happy about this.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511)