Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

One Year with R

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 266 posts

Re: One Year with R

#11

Post by dagw »

zhdc1 wrote: post #8
kome wrote: post #3

For my use case, R is absolutely terrible compared to some for profit statistical package / language. Using R feel like using an outdated, complicated and messy tool. But guess what: it's free.

> For my use case, R is absolutely terrible compared to some for profit statistical package / language. Which one? I've switched most of my work over to Julia, but I'd much rather use R or Python than Stata or SPSS.

What is your background? I'm assuming you either come from a programming background or at least enjoy programming and are pretty good at it. Most people I know who are either statisticians or scientists first and programmers only reluctantly love Stata and SPSS.

Re: One Year with R

#12

Post by indeed30 »

I love R more than any other language I have ever used. Perhaps more than any piece of software I've ever used. All of these points are valid, and yes, it's messy, and if you try to write the same type of code that you would in Python, it will frustrate you.

And yet.. it somehow works. It makes data analysis and statistical modelling a pleasure. It somehow gives off a sense of lightness, and makes it easy to investigate and explore. I would guess I am genuinely 2x as productive in R as I would be in Python on similar tasks.

I know it's not a "proper" language, but I think that, maybe, not everything has to be exactly like "proper" software engineering?

Re: One Year with R

#13

Post by AuthorizedCust »

I don’t like this. Much of this is:

1. pointing out that, like every other language, base R has idiosyncrasies

2. how use of R is more complex when you’re largely ignorant of the tidyverse, which is crucial for the vast majority of tissue today’s use of R

3. frustration because you’re using a language/ecosystem, that’s targeted for a few specific uses, as a general purpose programming language

Re: One Year with R

#14

Post by toto444 »

The points the author mentions are fair but something feels amiss. I have used R heavily and still use it from time to time and I never use most of the functions mentioned in the post. For instance I have never used switch().

R is for data manipulation. 90% of what I do in R is manipulate dataframes or matrices and then run machinelearningmodel(mydataframe) or ggplot(mydataframe). And for this it is incredibly efficient. You can rightly argue that some elements of the language are quirky but that's missing the point.

> Asked over 100 Stack Overflow R questions.

As a tangent I find a hundred questions asked the first year for a very mature language is a lot.

Re: One Year with R

#15

Post by roel_v »

I think (and I usually anger at least some people when I say this) that it's wrong to see R as a 'programming language'. I mean, it looks like one, and it's Turing complete so if you use that as a criterion it is a programming language, but I think it's more useful to see it as a stats software package with a text-only user interface. Approaching it this way instead of as just another language to 'pick up' makes using it much less frustrating.

Re: One Year with R

#16

Post by dagw »

musingsole wrote: post #10
zhdc1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For my use case, R is absolutely terrible compared to some for profit statistical package / language. Which one? I've switched most of my work over to Julia, but I'd much rather use R or Python than Stata or SPSS.

I don't understand the use case for SPSS. My local university is training their neuroscience researchers on it, which seems so odd in 2022 with Julia or python sitting right there.

Teaching someone who knows a bit of Excel and very little programming how to do statistical analysis in SPSS is easy and lets you focus on the statistics.

Teaching them to do statistical analysis in Julia will involve you spending 80% of your time teaching them Julia and maybe 20% of your time teaching them statistical analysis.

Re: One Year with R

#17

Post by Bostonian »

kome wrote: post #3

For my use case, R is absolutely terrible compared to some for profit statistical package / language. Using R feel like using an outdated, complicated and messy tool. But guess what: it's free.

The language itself can be criticized, but when academic statisticians publish a new method, they often post an R package, too, so it has recent functionality unavailable elsewhere.

Re: One Year with R

#18

Post by mtizim »

Fun fact: there exists a "Why R? Foundation" which holds yearly conferences, because after all these years the R community just cannot find a sensible reason to use the language.

Re: One Year with R

#19

Post by lvl102 »

Never liked R. Always felt like a cheap alternative to either proprietary solutions (Stata and SAS) or simply a better experience in Python.

Re: One Year with R

#20

Post by beernet »

Long-time R user here. Yes, many of these points are valid but I still think R is unbeaten when it comes to speed in (tabular) data exploration. In the article you mention that you missed using data.table - a significant portion of the problems you named would be solved or at least weakened by using data.table. Started working with it many years ago and never looked back. It's easy, powerful and efficient to use. I also find its Python pendant, pandas, much less intuitive to use (.loc() anyone?) although they compare performance wise.
Post reply on HN