In my experience, non-programmers are the only people who can grok R in the first hour.
For someone with a programming background, this is one of the best introductions I've seen: http://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/2623621262001
Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
31–40 of 40 posts
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#32Nice post. I've recently been trying to get back into R with the goal of being able to replace Excel. For the basic stuff R is great but as you start doing more complicated things it takes quite a while to figure out to do them in R. This is a part of the learning curve.
I really like Excel for adding up columns of numbers. Any task where you want to see the data (and the quantity of data is low enough to realistically be seen) and the operations performed on the data are relatively simple and straight-forward. But once the operations start getting more involved, I really start disliking Excel (or any spreadsheet). Excel shows the data but hides the formulas. At this point, I very mu…
Something I've been thinking about is an Excel frontend with an R backend. Each worksheet becomes a data frame so you can edit it in Excel and quickly apply some formula but you can also jump into an R console to do something more complicated.
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#33In my experience, non-programmers are the only people who can grok R in the first hour.
That's a very good way of putting it!
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really like Excel for adding up columns of numbers. Any task where you want to see the data (and the quantity of data is low enough to realistically be seen) and the operations performed on the data are relatively simple and straight-forward. But once the operations start getting more involved, I really start disliking Excel (or any spreadsheet). Excel shows the data but hides the formulas. At this point, I very mu…
Something I've been thinking about is an Excel frontend with an R backend. Each worksheet becomes a data frame so you can edit it in Excel and quickly apply some formula but you can also jump into an R console to do something more complicated.
Have a look at DataNitro for a similar idea with python as the backend: https://datanitro.com/
I've never used it, but it looks quite nifty.
It would certainly be interesting to see something similar for R.
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#35Earlier 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…
It's not checking you against a sexism filter - it is subtly pointing out the pervasive gender assumptions society has.
It's in all likelihood an innocent mistake on your side - but the accumulation of those tiny things is, in the long run, "not fun"(tm). It doesn't matter that they're innocent mistakes, it matters that it is a constant thing.
So, please, don't consider this an attack, but a polite request to double-check the next time you make a gendered reference to somebody. Every time you do check, you'll have made life a tiny bit better for the women in the field.
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#36In my experience, non-programmers are the only people who can grok R in the first hour.
I'm not so sure. A few years ago in university I took a stats course (offered by the maths department) that had twice-weekly mandatory labs where we learned and used R. Most people in the course were not programmers at all, and I ended up helping people most of the time during the course.
R is really weird, but non-programmers are typically unaccustomed to precisely typing non-english into a computer. They aren't trained to quickly spot syntax errors or grok error messages.
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone noticed, and gently corrected you. If you had wanted to, a very simple edit would have been the end of it. Instead, you went on some weird tangent about sexism filters and how it's A-OK, and now you're upset that we're on the tangent?
OK Fomite, I think we are repeating ourselves, so agreement is highly unlikely although I'm sure civil coexistence is likely. The author is a heck of a good writer about a topic I like, and also is female, and we can each be interested in one of those topics, its a big internet and we'll all fit in somehow with plenty of space. Have a pleasant day, and I hope you enjoyed the article.
its -> it's
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#38There'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…
> that is, the forward-slash was part of the filename, not the path...which I didn't even know was possible on any platform Nor did I. Which platform?
Don't remember for sure, might have been a Windows machine. I just tried it on my Mavericks OS X. It was allowed, but instead of:
sdf/index.html
sdf:index.html
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that is, the forward-slash was part of the filename, not the path...which I didn't even know was possible on any platform Nor did I. Which platform?
Don't remember for sure, might have been a Windows machine. I just tried it on my Mavericks OS X. It was allowed, but instead of: sdf/index.html it auto-translated to this: sdf:index.html (i'm assuming that's not a Sublime Text 3 thing, which is what I just tested on)
This fails on a Mac (10.9) and on CENTOS5 (2.6.18):
#include
#include
#include
int main()
{
int fd = creat("foo/bar", 1);
if (fd == -1) {
printf("error\n");
} else {
close(fd);
}
return 0;
}Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't remember for sure, might have been a Windows machine. I just tried it on my Mavericks OS X. It was allowed, but instead of: sdf/index.html it auto-translated to this: sdf:index.html (i'm assuming that's not a Sublime Text 3 thing, which is what I just tested on)
This fails on a Mac (10.9) and on CENTOS5 (2.6.18): #include #include #include int main() { int fd = creat("foo/bar", 1); if (fd == -1) { printf("error\n"); } else { close(fd); } return 0; }
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