181–190 of 266 posts
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> Anything important should not be done in Excel. Hold on a second while I go shut down the global economy for two years so we can teach everyone finance person how to program.
finance people who learn to program will outperform those who don't.
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You highlight four issues: 1. Documentation is accessible via the interpreter. You can type ?funcname to get documentation or ?libname for the entry point for almost every library, or use the Help tab in RStudio, the most common interpreter. Package documentation is typically hyperlinked text and of a high quality. You can also see syndicated versions of library documentation online in HTML format. Here is for instan…
The syntax issues yeah that was a mistake to include. Although my confusion about = and Far more severe is the scant documentation online. Don't take this as an attack on the language or community. I'm a huge fan of Standard ML and it's arguably in a worse state! I was interested in supporting R in the first place because I knew of its importance (if only vaguely).
Here’s a good example: https://dplyr.tidyverse.org
Equally confused about your take on the community. R community is sort of a perfect example of an inclusive community actively trying to include everyone with organizations like “rladies” for women in tech.
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Yes, but often different contexts. Let's say my volunteer org wants to keep track of events, who volunteered in them, etc. and wants to give an award to the volunteer who gave the most hours. How do you do that in Python? Why would you?
For me, Excel is a tool mostly for entering data manually. In the case you described, it would be good for that purpose. I suppose you would have a column for each volunteer and then just enter data. Then you can read the file with python (pandas) and make a sum over the columns and give the one with most hours. Of course this case is also easy to do in Excel, however, the idea is that if you know more powerful tools…
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Excel doesn't alter data without being asked either. What it does do by default is try to change how the data is displayed. If the column is properly set to the correct data type the data will be shown correctly because Excel doesn't change the actual data. Column types can be set when csv files are imported. The problem described in the article isn't an Excel issue. It is an issue of the geneticist failure to learn…
> Excel doesn't alter data without being asked either. What it does do by default is try to change how the data is displayed. This is easily falsifiable. In a "general" cell, when I enter 0002, it gets changed into 2, not just in display, but in actual content. When I change the cell type to text, it'll still be 2. Only if I enter 0002 after changing the type to text is the content kept. Similar when I want to have t…
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…
This is the typical „CS-people“ reaction to learning R. R is a language written by statisticians for statisticians which can be a good but also a bad thing. Fact is that R is the lingua franca of statistics, most new methods will be first available in R, rarely in python, almost never in julia. Despite the superior design of julia, there are good reasons to still use R, for example, there are many state of the art li…
There is no reason to use R when Excel can do the jobs. It is when Excel can’t handle the task at hand, R shines. I am well familiar with R, but for simple data manipulation, quick chart, pivot table, usually resort to a spreadsheet program. I maintain my Options Trading Journal in spreadsheet where I record all the Options trade I made, positions I hold, P&L, etc. I just can’t imagine doing that in R. R starts with…
There's no good way to check if you've made a mistake in the logic of your excel spreadsheet. You can easily test your R code.
If you need to work with multiple people excel is a nightmare. It works fine when one person needs to build something for themselves or just to show to someone else. When you get two or more people working together it's like sharing a keyboard with someone else.
Excel can do a lot of things, but there is a limit to what it can do. R or Python is typically what you would reach for when you need to do something beyond what excel is capable of.
There is no reason to use R when Excel can do the jobs. It is when Excel can’t handle the task at hand, R shines. I am well familiar with R, but for simple data manipulation, quick chart, pivot table, usually resort to a spreadsheet program. I maintain my Options Trading Journal in spreadsheet where I record all the Options trade I made, positions I hold, P&L, etc. I just can’t imagine doing that in R. R starts with…
> There is no reason to use R when Excel can do the jobs. It is when Excel can’t handle the task at hand, R shines. I think the problem is more nuanced because Excel can do a lot . There is a large set of use cases and tasks that are possible in Excel but your team would be a lot more efficient and productive using a programming language instead. The trick is to recognise those tradeoffs and it it's not as simple as…
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I've done this kind of conversion, not as a job, but on a case by case basis within my own work. An example would be taking a simple computation that I would share with people (mostly engineers) in the form of a spreadsheet, and instead turning it into a Python program, even replete with GUI. Here are some of the pitfalls that I've experienced. If I share a computation as a spreadsheet, people already know how to wor…
I’m doing this kind of task, and I tend to avoid any GUI and just have input and output files as simple text, CSV, or Excel spreadsheet. It seems to me that it’s the best way to have a satisfactory UX without too much headache.