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One Year with R

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Re: One Year with R

#261

Post by Breza »

edgyquant wrote: post #232
yarky wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn't help that almost nobody learned R as their first computer (as opposed to statistics) language. Aside from two statisticians I had as professors, I am yet to meet someone with deep understanding of statistics who doesn't speak R as first language ... I found it way easier to grasp the meaning of statistics by playing with R than by reading the maths.

You’re right, but I’d would think in recent years most stats people would have python as their first language. It probably comes preinstalled on their OS at this point (not sure if this applies to windows outside of WSL yet.)

Python has a big advantage in deep learning but R still has an edge in classical statistics.

Re: One Year with R

#262

Post by PaulLeiby »

da39a3ee wrote: post #254
dash2 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We might be talking at cross purposes. I'm thinking of e.g. a Rmarkdown notebook, which is indeed a script not (necessarily) an interactive notebook like Jupyter. And it can be automatically compiled, via a makefile or something similar, and put into version control. The point is that it makes sense to mix english prose + code to e.g. produce tables or graphs, even if most of the heavy lifting is done separately in c…

Ah, OK, yes I was talking at cross-purposes to some extent then, thanks. (Jupyter notebooks are hopeless in version control due to the JSON format, but I'm not familiar with Rmarkdown notebooks -- do you get sane diffs?) Yep, so what you say makes sense. Isn't it sometimes a bit overly prescriptive to assume all collaborators use Rmarkdown? (Perhaps not! I used to work in biology and statistics and R was very ubiquit…

No post body was provided.

Re: One Year with R

#263

Post by dash2 »

da39a3ee wrote: post #254
dash2 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We might be talking at cross purposes. I'm thinking of e.g. a Rmarkdown notebook, which is indeed a script not (necessarily) an interactive notebook like Jupyter. And it can be automatically compiled, via a makefile or something similar, and put into version control. The point is that it makes sense to mix english prose + code to e.g. produce tables or graphs, even if most of the heavy lifting is done separately in c…

Ah, OK, yes I was talking at cross-purposes to some extent then, thanks. (Jupyter notebooks are hopeless in version control due to the JSON format, but I'm not familiar with Rmarkdown notebooks -- do you get sane diffs?) Yep, so what you say makes sense. Isn't it sometimes a bit overly prescriptive to assume all collaborators use Rmarkdown? (Perhaps not! I used to work in biology and statistics and R was very ubiquit…

Rmarkdown indeed makes sane diffs, it's just a nice text-based format. You can use python or julia as well (see quarto.org for the latest version of this). Getting collaborators on board... yeah, that varies.

Re: One Year with R

#264

Post by delusional »

edgyquant wrote: post #229
delusional wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is there any reason you chose R over Python? Is it just because that’s the go to language?

We asked the people are going to be using it what they'd prefer. Many of them are recent graduates, and they told us they mostly used R during their university courses. It's just a pure familiarity play. The alternative was building a huge system on a mainframe (we're a legacy bank).

Really there wasn't a lot of thought put into the language. We figure that if it ends up being a total failure, we can just pivot.

Re: One Year with R

#265

Post by horsawlarway »

edgyquant wrote: post #223
horsawlarway wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appl…

But isn’t the consensus that R is a better language? At least that is what the cool kids said when I went to college (I never used Matlab except maybe a handful of times.)

define "better"?

They each have a few strengths over the other, but generally speaking, I much prefer the language consistency of Matlab.

My general experience is - industrial shops will be using Matlab. Almost all of my Matlab work was aerospace related (think sigint/radar/signal processing/modeling).

R is more popular in education environments - but I strongly suspect that's just because it's free. Post-grads don't have much lab funding to work with at the best of times, and Matlab with an associated set of plugins/libraries specific for your task can easily run 30k a seat.

Personally - I find it pretty telling that most places with money choose Matlab. Doesn't inherently make it better, but it does mean Matlab is getting used in places where mistakes are expensive, and there's a focus and consistency to the tooling that I just think is desperately lacking in R.

Re: One Year with R

#266

Post by [deleted] »

racl101 wrote: post #215
kafkaIncarnate wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Vim with the R command line wrapped around Makefiles. I don't even have RStudio installed. Works great. I can even pop up an interactive R command prompt session and do whatever I want in it, even quick ggplot2 graphs. Help shows up just as you would expect, and plots pop up in new windows. RStudio is much less advanced than people think it is, it's really just managing R's windows for you and doing generic IDE…

Do you have notes or documentation on how to get this working without RStudio? Preferably on a Macbook?

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