Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

#31

Post by dbaupp » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 12:53 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #30

I don't understand why people would want to do mathematics in imperative languages. (Yes, I understand imperative languages are faster, but why not just keep the imperative parts for the "inner loops", nicely isolated, and a functional core for everything else?)

Unfortunately, the R language isn't fast, especially not the imperative features (loops). A language like Julia is a better bet in that respect.

The drawcard of R is the breadth of specialised statistical packages. (Often with inner loops written in C for performance.)

Re: Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

#32

Post by baldfat » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 12:54 PM UTC

anacleto wrote: post #4

I'm not a big fan of Excel as IDE for R.

So down vote when someone says. I am not a fan of Excel? I can list several.

1) Excel your end result can not be replicated

2) Excel use in most shops use macros extensively and it is easy to not have your Excel environment available

3) The graphing capabilities of Excel is the reason why people still use pie charts

4) When doing analysis you want everything scripted? Excel as part of the tool chain is not something scriptable.

5) People usually have bad workflows with Excel and it takes learning R or Padas or Matlab or another statistics language to leave their current mindset

6) I can't think of one added benefit for having Excel as part of a good practice workflow unless you are mandated to produce some Excel spreadsheets which R can also do without touching Excel

I could keep going on....

Re: Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

#33

Post by tormeh » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 1:00 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #30

I don't understand why people would want to do mathematics in imperative languages. (Yes, I understand imperative languages are faster, but why not just keep the imperative parts for the "inner loops", nicely isolated, and a functional core for everything else?)

They're easier and faster to develop in. Remember that the scripts usually only need to be run once - maintainability is irrelevant.

I don't think this all of the difficulty is intrinsic to FP, but FP language designers don't usually care about newbie-friendliness. The closest thing to a user-friendly FP language I know about is Scala, and it, too, has lots and lots of arbitrary symbols and hideously complicated function signatures.

Remember, the typical scientist has no patience for monads, currying, inscrutable value names or functions-as-arguments and compiler complaints about function signatures are more likely to instill deep hatred than anything else.

I know it's an extreme example, but a statistician will never try to understand what something like "def map[B, That](f: A => B)(implicit bf: CanBuildFrom[Repr, B, That]): That" means, he'll just move on to a language that's easier.

Re: Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

#34

Post by baldfat » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 1:01 PM UTC

dbaupp wrote: post #31

amelius wrote: post #30

I don't understand why people would want to do mathematics in imperative languages. (Yes, I understand imperative languages are faster, but why not just keep the imperative parts for the "inner loops", nicely isolated, and a functional core for everything else?)

Unfortunately, the R language isn't fast, especially not the imperative features (loops). A language like Julia is a better bet in that respect. The drawcard of R is the breadth of specialised statistical packages. (Often with inner loops written in C for performance.)

in R loops are generally frown upon due to this issue.

BUT R is not slow when it comes to parallel processing or using Revolution Anayltics also has speed ups if you need it. R also has dplyr is speedy and the data.tables is even faster. I think the original Julia speed claims were a little biased to Julia and well there is plenty of awesome things about R, but "slow" isn't a far statement. There is a reason why R has grown so much.

Interesting argument for R usage: https://matloff.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/r-beats-python-r-be...

Re: Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

#35

Post by louden » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 1:05 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #30

I don't understand why people would want to do mathematics in imperative languages. (Yes, I understand imperative languages are faster, but why not just keep the imperative parts for the "inner loops", nicely isolated, and a functional core for everything else?)

R does support functional programming. In fact, it was based on Scheme (see discussion for comparison: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-December/181982.h...).

Re: Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

#36

Post by dagw » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 1:19 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #30

I don't understand why people would want to do mathematics in imperative languages. (Yes, I understand imperative languages are faster, but why not just keep the imperative parts for the "inner loops", nicely isolated, and a functional core for everything else?)

R is, at its core, a functional language with a bunch of largely optional imperative bits bolted on.

Re: Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

#37

Post by vkr » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 1:38 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #20

fasteRstat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you're right. It's the plane.

Typos on page: univerties FasteR - desctop application This tools hepls or as [an] application

The video presents version 1.4.1 (last 10 seconds of the video), the website only lists version 0.4.1. I assume you changed the version number after finishing the video?

It was hard/impossible for me to read the R code in the video while playing it at 1080p.

Re: Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

#38

Post by ekianjo » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 1:39 PM UTC

Windows only ? Meh. And integrating with Excel is completely useless (and meaningless, since you don't need to use a spreadsheet representation to work with data when you think in R), R beats Excel for about everything once you are used to it.

Re: Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

#39

Post by ekianjo » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 1:42 PM UTC

Blahah wrote: post #19

bencollier49 wrote: post #16

And yet they keep that butt-ugly logo. Is it an in-joke, or something?

It actually kind of is. GNU logos are consistently incredibly ugly and show utter disdain for, or lack of awareness of, graphical design [0]. It could be almost like a philosophical point: "GNU software is utilitarian. We don't waste time on fancy graphics". Or it could be that GNU developers tend to be... developers. No designers in sight, and no appreciation for visual aesthetics. 0: https://www.gnu.org/graphics/pa…

> GNU logos are consistently incredibly ugly

True, but since it's Free Software you can release a version of the same code by yourself with a better logo. Nobody prevents you from changing anything, that's what's beautiful with GNU tools.

Re: Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

#40

Post by vkr » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 1:44 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #38

Windows only ? Meh. And integrating with Excel is completely useless (and meaningless, since you don't need to use a spreadsheet representation to work with data when you think in R), R beats Excel for about everything once you are used to it.

I was also looking for an OS X / Linux version. The website doesn't mention being Windows only, will other operating systems be supported in the future?