51–60 of 128 posts
R doesn't seem to get much frontpage love on HN, or even if it does and I haven't seen, what would people suggest is the technology for statistics going forward? I really hoped it would be around Clojure (e.g. Incanter[1]) and not Python, for entirely selfish reasons. [1]: http://incanter.org/
I feel like it starts off a little bit on the wrong foot by introducing basic types as scalar variables. In reality R has no scalar variables, everything is a vector, list, and scalars are immediately coerced into a vector eg: > is.vector("a") [1] TRUE This might seem like nitpicking but it leads to a world of confusion when programmers used to languages with scalars start trying to use R that way and it took me seve…
Beautiful website. I highly recommend supplementing a course like this (where you learn about the language's ecosystem) with the R Cookbook from O'Reilly. It's been a lifesaver for me, and helped me learn R over the course of a few months of needing it at a new job. Now I find that I need to learn something else for data munging- R is terrible at data manipulation and querying. The querying bit is solvable with the i…
set.seed(123)
dfrm I'm not a big fan of sqldf because imo R is not supposed to act like SQL. Using sqldf in practice would require a lot of query string manipulation and takes away from the nice functional features of R.
Nevertheless, it is very easy to write incomprehensible R code. The best way to avoid this is to take one of the existing style guides (Google, Hadley Wickham's) and adopt it seriously.
I do most of my stats work in Matlab, why should I use R?
You shouldn't, necessarily. I use R almost exclusively and I absolutely love it. But people can get a little carried away with picking and recommending the "best" language for particular task. If you feel very comfortable and skilled in Matlab, and you aren't finding that there are regular situations where Matlab can't do what you want, I wouldn't really advocate switching. Same goes for someone working primarily in…
But I also agree that if you're already proficient with Matlab and happy, then maybe you don't need to learn R (though often you can be blissfully ignorant of your possibilities if you are unaware of the vast libraries that another language/environment offers).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main reason I would put forward is that it's completely free and open source. That means that all your work is transferable and usable by anybody, not just people who have the ability to use Matlab (including possibly your future self).
Out of curiosity, if you want open source, what's wrong with Octave or the likes?
Beautiful website. I highly recommend supplementing a course like this (where you learn about the language's ecosystem) with the R Cookbook from O'Reilly. It's been a lifesaver for me, and helped me learn R over the course of a few months of needing it at a new job. Now I find that I need to learn something else for data munging- R is terrible at data manipulation and querying. The querying bit is solvable with the i…
dfrm$height[substr(dfrm$name,1,1) == "D"]
subset(dfrm, grepl("^D", name), select = height)This is great. I've nearly completed a class at UC Berkeley which was almost entirely in R and I can say with certainty that it is a marvelous language. It is powerful, concise, and has an incredibly robust community. I've experimented with many programming languages, but I have not used one which allows you to experiment as rapidly as R. I'm currently going through the Codeschool lessons to see if there is anything…