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A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

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Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#231

Post by natalyarostova »

curiousgal wrote: post #51
natalyarostova wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pandas has a lot of defensive copying. I love Pandas, but I think it demands a lot from the user. When I started using it I was new to traditional coding (i.e. knowing anything about datastructures), and have come from R. Over time as I've learned a real amount about legitimate data structures, I've become far far better with Pandas.

What data structures do you recommend learning about?

I literally did not understand the fundamentals when I started Python (e.g. Dictionaries, triples)

Re: A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

#232

Post by jejones3141 »

rossdavidh wrote: post #30
notafraudster wrote: post #20

There are a bunch of odd non-standard syntax choices in this tutorial. For example, the author ends statements with semicolons. R does allow equal sign assignment (although style guides prefer the stupid arrow syntax). The author mentions Bioconductorm the... second biggest package repository for the language? I clicked because I was a programmer for 15 years before I used R, and I have subsequently developed and shi…

the "stupid arrow syntax" is not nearly so stupid, and I speak here as a 10+ year Python developer, as the misuse of the equal sign that every C-style language seems to think is ok. The = sign meant something long before computer programming, and it is something the developer community ought to be ashamed of that it is being used for "change this thing to that". /rant

I would willingly put up with the stupid arrow syntax if I could use ← for it, and with the gratuitously confusing to people coming from other languages use of [[ ]] for an element of a list rather than a sublist if I could use ⟦ ⟧.
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