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One Year with R

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Re: One Year with R

#101

Post by dm319 »

hadley wrote: post #64
indeed30 wrote: post #12

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 investig…

100% this :)

Ha ha, I love that this is your only comment here! Thanks for all your work on R.

I came here with sleeves rolled up to defend the language, but was pleasantly surprised to find it was already being done much better than I could have.

It's interesting to see how R elicits such a reaction to some programmers. I think it's frequently misunderstood, and R needs to be used in a particular way to allow it to fly.

When I've tried to recreate analyses in Python or Julia, they have nowhere near the fluency of R. It isn't possible to know this if you're messing around with if statements and other procedural methods of achieving things which are better suited to other languages, but rather when crunching data for analysis and graphically visualising the results.

I also understand that it's due to R's lisp-y-ness that allows us to have tidyverse in the first place.

Question for Hadley - there have been a couple of projects to fuse the speed of data.table and tidyverse. What do you think of this aim and are you tempted to change tidyverse to get to the speeds of data.table, or would that require too much of a fundamental change?

Re: One Year with R

#102

Post by vharuck »

clove wrote: post #52
crispyambulance wrote: post #28

I was expecting a rant, but the OP's article is actually very thoughtful. He definitely knows what he's talking about. The thing about R, for me and many others, is that it's very much an everyday grind language. Especially with Rstudio, its natural domain is as one of "notebook" languages like python, julia, matlab, and mathematica but with a more clear focus towards the tasks of data-analysis. I just tell the BI-to…

I've used R for 19 years and do not have any other programming language ability. I am curious: What is frustrating to you about R relative to other languages?

In my experience:

- It has a bunch of different types of classes, and they all behave differently. Debugging isn't awful, but it's harder than it should be. Also, the documentation isn't clear about which classes to use.

- A lot of the workhorse functions suffer from parameter glut. Despite having different kinds of classes, almost all functions expect plain vectors. Packages like survival show how objects make it easier to read code, reuse data, and validate data. Without the base packages doing it more, everyone's chosen their own systems. The community's been gravitating to organizing "objects" as rows in tables (i.e. tidy).

- The way a function uses an argument might surprisingly change based on other arguments given (e.g., `binom.test`). And then the documentation won't have examples for the different use cases.

- Most users don't have the time or desire to become better R programmers. They have other work to do. For my own work, I write packages with custom classes, functions, and template documents. For collaboration, I keep things very plain and rarely go beyond dplyr; very often, the script goes between two steps executed in a GUI software.

Re: One Year with R

#103

Post by hadley »

tel wrote: post #61

R, and by R I mean R+tidyverse, is the world's best graphing calculator attached to an OK scheme. To which I mean R is a highly optimized, well-oiled machine if you're using it for its highly-optimized, well-oiled purposes. I tend to have notebooks full of tiny fragments like this dat_min %>% group_by(ymd = make_date(year(date), month(date), day(date))) %>% summarize(vol_btc=sum(vol_btc), vol_usdt=sum(vol_usdt), trad…

I love the phrase "eviscerate a fresh data set" :D

Re: One Year with R

#104

Post by dm319 »

horsawlarway wrote: post #96
indeed30 wrote: post #12

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 investig…

Coming from Matlab, I have the opposite feeling. I truly, genuinely dislike the language. I think it's very productive, and I appreciate that Matlab costs an arm and a leg (and god help you once you start paying for some of the nicer packages on top) - but Matlab has spoiled me immensely on the language front. To me, Matlab feels like a language that was designed with an intent to appeal to folks with some understand…

Using pipes and tidyverse/data.table allows for great things in R, and has a strong functional feel. It can be quite beautiful reshaping data, splitting, map, recombining and plotting it.

It doesn't go well at all with a procedural method.

Re: One Year with R

#105

Post by zhdc1 »

dagw wrote: post #11
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.

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.

> What is your background?

Academic research, so more econometrics/data science work, but I have some experience with application programming that I've managed to leverage.

> Most people I know who are either statisticians or scientists first and programmers only reluctantly love Stata and SPSS

They are good to the extent that a lot of published - social science - research uses terms and methods that assume you're using one of the two. Of course, having an ok point and click interface also helps.

However, data access, aggregation, and cleaning are easily ninety percent of what's involved in even basic econometric(y) research. It is orders of magnitude easier to do all of this programmatically in R. Once you start working with larger datasets, or once performance becomes an issue, you pretty much have to transition to Python, Julia, or something similar by default.

Re: One Year with R

#106

Post by [deleted] »

hadley wrote: post #64
indeed30 wrote: post #12

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 investig…

100% this :)

[deleted]

Re: One Year with R

#107

Post by horsawlarway »

pantulis wrote: post #24
em500 wrote: post #23

The common trope with R is that statisticians and love it and developers hate it. The the main reason that statisticians love it is that the libraries useful to them are much better in R than elsewhere (though Python keeps encroaching in that turf, and "real developers" dislike Python a lot less than they do R). The main reasons that developers hate it is that it is very unlike almost all other languages that they're…

I had some Matlab experience about 3 decades ago. What's you take in Matlab vs R as programming languages?

My take is that Matlab is better in basically every regard, with the exception that the same functionality will cost you a considerable amount of real world money.

Having used both in a professional setting - and coming in with a fair bit of programming experience - Matlab is generally a pleasure to use. It's different where it needs to be in order to treat matrices as first class citizens, but otherwise you can apply many of the same intuitions and paradigms that you would in any other language.

R on the other hand... R is a fucking disaster of inconsistency. I find myself incredibly frustrated attempting to do simple and sane things - things that I know are only a line or two in Matlab (or even python) and instead fighting with "which version of the 12 different slight variations of this operator are you attempting to use today!" hell scape.

My strong guess is that if you have no coding experience, and you learn R fairly thoroughly - it will feel very nice. My problem is that for anyone with actual coding experience, it's like being given a keyboard with a qwerty layout, but which is actually using dvorak. All your intuitions are pointlessly wrong - not because they are actually problematic, but because R has decided that the A key is really on the other side of the fucking keyboard.

Re: One Year with R

#108

Post by hadley »

epistasis wrote: post #73
hadley wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any specific examples that illustrate the general problem? I'd love to better understand what you're looking for in docs.

Thanks for taking my aggressive comment with such spirit, it really speaks to a good community. (Sleep training an infant has me a bit frazzled) I should have been more specific, the ... frustration for me comes up mostly in ggplot, Which usually directs you to layer(). Which gets parameter string documentation like: * geom - The geometric object to use display the data * stat - The statistical transformation to use…

Ah yeah, connecting the dots in ggplot2 docs is hard. It's hard for us to document because, under the hood, the pieces quite decoupled and different pieces are responsible for different arguments. But since we last took a deep dive on the ggplot2 docs, we've gotten much better at generating docs with code, so maybe it's time to have another look. I've filed an issue (https://github.com/tidyverse/ggplot2/issues/4770) so we don't forget about it, but no guarantees about when it might get done.

Re: One Year with R

#110

Post by zhdc1 »

kwccoin wrote: post #40
musingsole wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have been using SPSS decades and I think it is a good statistical tool for those who do not want to do programming much. It gives me something Iu can easily explain to and teacher other statistical users (e.g. hand in many papers with some regression analysis in it and team members who have no programming experience and do NOT want to learn much other than absolutely minimum and necessary; they are social scientists…

It's 80% about having a point and click interface, 10% about path dependency effects, and 10% about whether or not they have a paid license.
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