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

141–150 of 266 posts

Re: One Year with R

#141

Post by msaharia »

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 :)

Not a lot of people would realize that Hadley is a minor celebrity in many scientific fields due to Tidyverse! Thanks for all the work.

Re: One Year with R

#142

Post by rvanlaar »

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?

I'm not OP.

To me, it's the tooling around it. Everything is done in R-studio and it's focus is to generate statistical documents.

The result is a sub optimum solution. It lacks good tooling around installing and running R programs. R programs don't import, they include. It doesn't make it more readable. R-studio is very Emacs like in the sense that it just lacks a decent editor. Due to R-studio being the default, there's not much support for other editors.

Re: One Year with R

#144

Post by sntscy »

CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #78
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 also use R for any heavy data manipulation, but I primarily use the data.table package. The efficiency that both of these packages unlock is absolutely unparalleled in any other tabular data manipulation library, in any other language that I have used. And R has the top 2!! My skin writhes every time I need to type: table.loc[(table.column > 2) | (table.column2 when I want to subset a table.

Can't get around resetting the index, as far as I know, but for the filtering you can also do,

`table.query("column > 2 and column2 < 3")`

Re: One Year with R

#145

Post by jdougan »

peatmoss wrote: post #139
jdougan wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an better alternate universe where xlisp-stat doesn't fall behind and S doesn't happen.

Interestingly, there appears to be an attempted reboot: https://lisp-stat.dev/ My first reaction, is "why not on a modern Scheme as opposed to Common Lisp" and in so thinking, I have demonstrated exactly why no lisp / scheme has ever achieved critical mass :-)

Obvious answer: 3rd party library support. Same thing that makes R ubiquitous.

Re: One Year with R

#146

Post by azalemeth »

dm319 wrote: post #128
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…

You don't need the download file command -- read CSV works with URLs directly :-)

Re: One Year with R

#148

Post by dm319 »

azalemeth wrote: post #146
dm319 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't need the download file command -- read CSV works with URLs directly :-)

Oh nice, that's very useful to know!

Re: One Year with R

#149

Post by maleldil »

mellavora wrote: post #118
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…

> "real developers" dislike Python a lot less than they do R I thought that was real Scottmen. Because real Scottsmen prefer: table.loc[(table.column > 2) | (table.column2 to table[column > 2 & column2 and everyone knows this! not to mention, if you aren't managing 100 virtual environments and 100 conda environments (with different syntax for requirements), you aren't a real scottsman!

You can do

    table.query('column > 2 or column2
If you want. I'm not sure why you're dropping the index there.

Re: One Year with R

#150

Post by jghn »

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…

> R feels like a language that was built for people who were using excel

The S language predates the first release of Excel by 11 years.

> and which becomes literal baggage trying to use R

I've had the opposite experience. My experience was that having a broad array of programming experience made it easier to pick up the weirder corners of R. It became more likely that I'd seen *something* similar to that construct in the past. The converse has also been true. Seeing all the weird corners in R has made it easier to pick up new concepts in other languages & paradigms as it's been more likely I've seen *something* similar from R.

Post reply on HN