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One Year with R

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Re: One Year with R

#121

Post by AuthorizedCust »

epistasis wrote: post #57
fn-mote wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how use of R is more complex when you’re largely ignorant of the tidyverse This. I'm interested in non-flamewar non-religious reasons that the tidyverse is bad. He does give some. I think his complaints about inconsistency and a moving target have some validity. However, the price of not using tidyverse is (roughly) paid in the rest of the article. I would definitely not use R without it. Read his Section 5 on the…

Worst part of the tidyverse is learning it, and then looking up how to use specific functions. The bad documentation is mostly in the ggplot lib though. It's a pleasure to use, though!

The “bad” ggplot documentation is mostly a function of one’s own understanding of the grammar of graphics. That’s what the “gg” in ggplot stands for.

If you don’t understand the GG, then ggplot will seem opaque, and no goodness of documentation will suffice.

I don’t mean to blame the user. Perhaps the ggplot documentation could improve by reinforcing the need to understand that or referencing it more frequently?

Re: One Year with R

#122

Post by bachmeier »

I agree with the concerns about lists. They're a poor substitute for structs in a language with static typing. By now I've accumulated lots of knowledge and helper functions.

You can dramatically simplify your life by using lists with lapply and related functions. I teach students with no previous programming experience to do some things that would otherwise be far too complex, but I also have to write a helper function to convert the output into a usable form for further analysis like plotting.

Re: One Year with R

#123

Post by mellavora »

bluenose69 wrote: post #79

R is designed for data analysis, not for general computing. Its syntax differs from that of other systems. Python's syntax also differs from other systems. Same for Matlab. And so on. Non-uniformity imposes a burden that will be too much to bear, unless the system offers particular advantages. The fact that several systems co-exist is proof that the advantage-burden balance is favourable in each case. There is no nee…

AND! packages don't update every 3 weeks breaking things!

My diety! someone was complaining about inconsistent syntax but doesn't recognize inconsistent dependencies?

Re: One Year with R

#124

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: One Year with R

#125

Post by mellavora »

em500 wrote: post #45
probably_wrong wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to side with the author here: if he read "Advanced R", "R for data Science", "The R Inferno", "Rtips. Revival 2014!", the official "An Introduction to R", "R Language Definition", and "R FAQ", and yet he still has problems with the language , then maybe the language is to blame. And even if the author is the problem, I wouldn't accuse them of not reading enough.

Ok, but if someone claims to have read all the Python manuals and wrote something like > Python has two types of empty string, array('u',) and "" you'd probably conclude that hasn't really understood what he read.

does f"" also count as an empty string? Because oddly enough, I don't see anything in that syntax which suggests that it is really a function which returns a formatted version of whatever is in the "".

Re: One Year with R

#126

Post by mellavora »

CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #59

I would say about 90% of the posts / articles / comments I see on the internet which discuss R are usually of the "meta" format. They talk about R's strengths or weaknesses, about the difference between R and Python, about how much they love or hate R, or any other high level subject. I can't remember the last time I saw a project someone did in R, or a tutorial on how to do something in R, get very much traction any…

> I can't remember the last time I saw a project someone did in R, or a tutorial on how to do something in R, get very much traction anywhere.

well, you know, I'm not very active in C++ any more, and I haven't seen an article in over a decade on C++ which received any traction at all. So I guess C++ isn't getting any traction any more either.

Re: One Year with R

#127

Post by bachmeier »

delusional wrote: post #117
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…

> R is a highly optimized, well-oiled machine if you're using it for its highly-optimized, well-oiled purposes. This hits home for me. We are just starting to use R for risk modeling where I work. R, more than any language I've ever used, makes me appreciate "worse is better". From a theoretical "aesthetic" perspective R is a mess. Yet for data processing all those theoretical concerns don't matter. It just works. It…

I hadn't thought about R as a "worse is better" language, but that's a good way to think about it. Makes sense, too, since it came from the place that inspired worse is better.

Re: One Year with R

#128

Post by dm319 »

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…

This is just a quick example - I would be grateful if people could recreate this brief look at UK COVID figures in another language:

  library(tidyverse)
  library(scales)
  
  download.file(url = "https://api.coronavirus.data.gov.uk/v2/data?areaType=overview&metric=covidOccupiedMVBeds&metric=newAdmissions&metric=newCasesBySpecimenDate&metric=newDeaths28DaysByDeathDate&metric=newPeopleReceivingFirstDose&format=csv", destfile = "./data.csv", method = "wget")
  
  read_csv("./data.csv") %>%
  pivot_longer(names_to = "Data", cols = c(newCasesBySpecimenDate,
                       covidOccupiedMVBeds,
                       newAdmissions,
                       newDeaths28DaysByDeathDate)) %>%
  mutate(Data = factor(Data)) %>%
  mutate(Data = recode_factor(Data, newCasesBySpecimenDate = "New Cases",
         newAdmissions = "Admissions",
         newDeaths28DaysByDeathDate = "Deaths",
         covidOccupiedMVBeds = "Ventilated")) %>%
  ggplot(aes(y = value, x = date, colour = Data))+
  geom_point(size = 1, colour = "gray", alpha = 0.6)+
  geom_smooth(type = "LOESS", span = 0.1)+
  labs(y = "Daily rate", x = "Date", colour = "UK COVID-19")+
  scale_x_date(date_breaks = "months", date_labels = "%b-%y")+
  scale_y_log10(labels = comma(10 ^ (0:5),
                 accuracy = 1),
         breaks = 10 ^ (0:5))+
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45, hjust = 1))

Re: One Year with R

#129

Post by substation13 »

j_m_b wrote: post #91

My favorite operator is the pipe operator. When I first found out you could do a simple `ls | more` to read long outputs, it was an eye opening experience. In Clojure, we have the threading macros, `->` and `->>` that do a very similar thing. In R, we have `%>%` and now the native `|>`. Whenever a language has this operator and it is widely used, I know I am going to love it.

I credit F# with much of the popularity of the forward pipe operator. Unlike Haskell etc. which emphasize function binding (>>), idiomatic F# has pipes all over.

    [1..10]
    |> Seq.filter (fun x -> x % 2 = 0)
    |> Seq.map (fun x -> x * x * x)

Re: One Year with R

#130

Post by chubot »

The popularity of the Tidyverse is a major blow to your motivation to learn R. Why would anyone want to learn a language that is treated as secondary to some packages? Worse still, if that turns out to be the best way to use R, then you’re forced to admit that R is a polished turd with a fragmented community.

As others have mentioned, just use tidyverse. I picked it up 4 years ago, and last week I went back to the code I wrote then.

I was productive in minutes. I could read the code, modify it, and easily test it in the REPL. The docs for dplyr are good.

ggplot2 is still awesome and the docs are good there too. ggplot2 is the fastest way to figure out what you want and make a pretty plot.

(However one thing that still annoys me is that R moves faster than Debian. So it's possible to do install.packages() in R, and it will break telling you your Debian R interpreter is too old. There is no easy solution for this, just a bunch of workarounds)

-----

OK, sure you can call it a polished turd, and to some degree that's true. But a polished turd is better than just using ... a turd!

The error messages in R are not quite as good as Python, but I wouldn't call it a problem. I'm able to localize the source of an error, even when using tidyverse.

My article comparing tidyverse to some other solutions:

What Is a Data Frame? (In Python, R, and SQL) http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/11/30.html

----

But would I recommend learning it to anyone else? Absolutely not. We can do so much better.

I would recommend with the caveat that it's one of the hardest languages I've had to learn. However that is partly because it changes how you think. But if you have a certain type of problem then you have to change how you think, or you'll never get it done. Data analysis is surprisingly laborious even for people who have say written compilers and such.

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