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Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour

alyssafrazee.com

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Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour

#11

Post by pessimizer »

VLM wrote: post #8
vcrash wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of this piece is a woman.

Luckily it doesn't change my response in any way other than in addition to all the "he" translating to "the author" all the "she" should refer to "the author's sister". I'm a "he" who provided software support to my sister, so you can see the likely source of that assumption. No negative implication of her ability to successfully portray her chosen gender role intended. Also I think its lame to check out bylines to m…

You don't have to run a "sexism filter" as long as you don't assume that every speaker (whether technical or not) is a man. If you think that the grammatically weird "they" or "he/she" is awkward, and "OP" or "the author" too cold, you've restricted yourself to checking bylines.

Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour

#12

Post by catinsocks »

minimaxir wrote: post #6
danso wrote: post #2

There's not much you can actually teach to someone in an hour, especially about programming. So much of it is dependent on other computer skills...I once taught a class for five hours of introductory programming, and while some people learned things, we were frequently caught up in things like people saving filenames of "folder/hello.rb"...that is, the forward-slash was part of the filename, not the path...which I di…

RStudio is the best IDE I've ever used and I wish something like that existed for other programming languages. The default workspace is split into the script, data, terminal, and meta (files/charts/help), and selecting a data frame variable will display it in a formatted window, making it very, very easy to debug data issues (I'm attempting to switch from R to Python/pandas due to performance/package issues, and I'm…

Check out Spyder if you are doing Science stuff with python: https://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/

Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour

#13

Post by [deleted] »

Fomite wrote: post #9
VLM wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily it doesn't change my response in any way other than in addition to all the "he" translating to "the author" all the "she" should refer to "the author's sister". I'm a "he" who provided software support to my sister, so you can see the likely source of that assumption. No negative implication of her ability to successfully portray her chosen gender role intended. Also I think its lame to check out bylines to m…

It's not a byline. It's the name of the website, the name of the window when opened in Safari, it's got her picture right next to the text . You might not have belittled her because she's a woman, but simply assuming "Programming article = male by default" is in and of itself harmful.

[deleted]

Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour

#14

Post by Fomite »

[deleted] wrote: post #13
Fomite wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a byline. It's the name of the website, the name of the window when opened in Safari, it's got her picture right next to the text . You might not have belittled her because she's a woman, but simply assuming "Programming article = male by default" is in and of itself harmful.

[deleted]

Lets try p(female|has authored programming article on a blog called 'http://alyssafrazee.com' with a woman's picture on the side).

VLM made a mistake. They were told, rather gently, of their mistake. "My mistake, edited" would have been fine. Instead they doubled down that they were totally right and fine and cool with blazing past ample evidence of the author's gender in pursuit of "Male as Default".

Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour

#15

Post by jebus989 »

Per the comments on the article I'd also advise "1) Google says so: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Rguide.xml

2) It's the accepted convention of the language. When she looks things up of SO, they'll use it; if she looks at a package's source, they'll use it.

3) In RStudio it's "option+hypen" (Mac) to type the four-character " 4) Statistically-speaking, things like x = x + 1 makes no sense

5) You need "6) 2 -> x

Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour

#16

Post by pessimizer »

[deleted] wrote: post #13
Fomite wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a byline. It's the name of the website, the name of the window when opened in Safari, it's got her picture right next to the text . You might not have belittled her because she's a woman, but simply assuming "Programming article = male by default" is in and of itself harmful.

[deleted]

If p(female) was 5%, would it be safe to assume that everyone is a man?

Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour

#17

Post by anaphor »

jebus989 wrote: post #15

Per the comments on the article I'd also advise " 1) Google says so: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Rguide.xml 2) It's the accepted convention of the language. When she looks things up of SO, they'll use it; if she looks at a package's source, they'll use it. 3) In RStudio it's "option+hypen" (Mac) to type the four-character " 4) Statistically-speaking, things like x = x + 1 makes no sense 5) You n…

Also, a language shouldn't use the same operator for declaration (initialization in dynamic languages) and assignment imho.

Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour

#18

Post by flyingbrotus »

jebus989 wrote: post #15

Per the comments on the article I'd also advise " 1) Google says so: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Rguide.xml 2) It's the accepted convention of the language. When she looks things up of SO, they'll use it; if she looks at a package's source, they'll use it. 3) In RStudio it's "option+hypen" (Mac) to type the four-character " 4) Statistically-speaking, things like x = x + 1 makes no sense 5) You n…

"The operators <- and = assign into the environment in which they are evaluated. The operator <- can be used anywhere, whereas the operator = is only allowed at the top level (e.g., in the complete expression typed at the command prompt) or as one of the subexpressions in a braced list of expressions."

Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour

#19

Post by flyingbrotus »

VLM wrote: post #4

As an intro, its well written and documented. If there is a fail, his sister is a senior in sociology and she "must have" already done significant statistical analysis in class... right? At the very least did some averages using her calculator in high school or something? So there should be substantial opportunity for compare/contrast, assuming his sister is compatible with this learning technique and the author know…

R has dedicated drivers for every database that I've ever had to use and when that doesn't work, there's the RODBC package. Working with "complicated multi-site relational database[s]" is always a pain in the ass, so I don't see why the burden of simplifying this should fall on R.

There are tools (such as RHIPE) to connect R to multi-node Hadoop clusters so that complex statistical algorithms can be written in R and compiled as MapReduce jobs. This type of tool seems like what you wish R had, but we're a ways away from having this for every distributed data source...

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