Big Book of R • Hacker News Board

Re: Big Book of R

#11

Post by hughess » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 7:24 PM UTC

This is great - I used to use R all the time when I worked in finance and wish I had this resource back then!

R and RMarkdown were big inspirations for what we're building at evidence.dev now, so very grateful to everyone involved in the R community

Re: Big Book of R

#12

Post by madcaptenor » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 7:38 PM UTC

wpollock wrote: post #3

Very nice, but instead of an owl, shouldn't the cover illustration be a pirate?

Sadly, the R community has never really embraced the pirate thing.

Re: Big Book of R

#13

Post by DadBase » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 7:41 PM UTC

wpollock wrote: post #3

Very nice, but instead of an owl, shouldn't the cover illustration be a pirate?

Totally agree. R is pure pirate energy. Half the functions are hidden on purpose, the other half only work if you chant the right incantation while facing the CRAN mirror at dawn.

Re: Big Book of R

#14

Post by haberman » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 7:42 PM UTC

thangalin wrote: post #7

Tangentially, R can help produce living Markdown documents (.Rmd files). A couple of ways include pandoc with knitr[0] or my FOSS text editor, KeenWrite[1]. I've kept the R syntax in KeenWrite compatible with knitr. Living documents as part of a build process can produce PDFs that are always up-to-date with respect to external data sources[2], which includes source code. [0]: https://yihui.org/knitr/ [1]: https://kee…

There is also Quarto, which I have had a good experience with: https://quarto.org/

Re: Big Book of R

#15

Post by brcmthrowaway » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 7:43 PM UTC

Does R support LLM?

Re: Big Book of R

#16

Post by bachmeier » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 7:51 PM UTC

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #9

What is the best way to integrate some R code with a python backend? I’ve been tempted to port to python, but some of the stats libraries have no good counterparts, so, is there a ergonomic way to do this?

Not sure what you mean by "python backend". If you mean calling R from Python, rpy2 mentioned in the other comment works well. If you mean the other direction, RStudio has this all built in. This is probably the best place to start: https://rstudio.github.io/reticulate/articles/calling_python...

Re: Big Book of R

#17

Post by esafak » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 8:00 PM UTC

madcaptenor wrote: post #12

wpollock wrote: post #3

Very nice, but instead of an owl, shouldn't the cover illustration be a pirate?

Sadly, the R community has never really embraced the pirate thing.

Statisticians don't really embody the pirate spirit, do they :)

Re: Big Book of R

#18

Post by bryanrasmussen » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 8:13 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #17

madcaptenor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, the R community has never really embraced the pirate thing.

Statisticians don't really embody the pirate spirit, do they :)

The average Statistician doesn't, but the mean ones do.

Re: Big Book of R

#19

Post by countrymile » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 8:14 PM UTC

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #15

Does R support LLM?

There are packages for that. Copilot is well integrated in Rstudio.

Re: Big Book of R

#20

Post by MrLeap » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 8:15 PM UTC

DadBase wrote: post #13

wpollock wrote: post #3

Very nice, but instead of an owl, shouldn't the cover illustration be a pirate?

Totally agree. R is pure pirate energy. Half the functions are hidden on purpose, the other half only work if you chant the right incantation while facing the CRAN mirror at dawn.

If you started with SAS for statistics like I did, you'd see how absolutely civilized R is in comparison.