I do wish they'd change the name, R is such a difficult search term
using rseek.org will help for search on R-related pages.
Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?
#32I'm a non-IT employee (but with a comp-sci background) working in the insurance sector, and I'm currently managing R adoption for a group of about 30 business analysts with minimal programming background. Programming in the business world is screwed up beyond all imagination. The more money a given application is responsible for, the more likely it is that it's a house-of-cards (pun intended for MVS nerds). They're a…
It is surprising how many business people aren't afraid to build monstrous macro-driven spreadsheets, but cringe at the thought of programming.
Makes me wonder if it is a UI problem. In the macro spreadsheet, you have data with code tied to it. In the programming world, you generally have code accessing data.
The abstractions might just be wrong for business people and a "simple" change could reduce a lot of IT pain.
Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?
#33It think it's more like "abandon Perl/php/javascript/whatever in favour of Python/Ruby/Lisp/whatever".
As long as there aren't more than 10 books written about the yet unborn data-cruncher saviour and as long as the brand new alternative isn't adopted in courses, I wouldn't bother -- unless you want to be the saviour's father (i.e. developer) of course.
Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?
#34I would love to use R for my latest project, but as far as I know you can't create a compiled executable for use in a runtime, live web environment. Anybody know of a solution to this issue?
Rserve is an tcp/ip interface to R so you can send R code from any other language. I have used the rserve-ruby interface to some success.
Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?
#35I predict a 10 year campaign of conquest followed by a 30 year death march. R is a complete mess that kicks ass in its niche. There are too many data types and the syntax seems kind of random, but two lines of R can get you publication quality graphics. R is really becoming huge in academia. As far as I can tell, health sciences is the last SAS holdout. I expect it to take over business as well. Biz types will love i…
Yeah, in my experience, most biostatisticians (especially those involved in public health and clinical research) are SAS folks. Some of that is inertia- a lot of these people learned SAS at the same time they were learning stats. However, I think that most of SAS's continuing prevalence is due to the fact that, for all of its (many, many, many) problems, SAS is a freakin' log chipper when it comes to statistics- it doesn't care how much data you throw at it, or what kinds of crazy and/or exotic statistics you ask it for- if you can decipher its syntax, you can get it to do it.
Even for stuff that a lot of other programs can do just fine, SAS often has an edge. For example, everybody and their brother can do a logistic regression model... but SAS can give you confidence intervals for all kinds of crazy parts of the model that SPSS won't even bother calculating and that R will only give you point estimates for.
The other great thing about SAS is that a lot of the good statistics books from the last twenty or thirty years include SAS sample code- for example, I'm currently having to do some off-the-beaten-path ANOVA stuff, and the reference I'm using (Edwards' "Analysis of Variance for the Behavioral Sciences") uses SAS as its language of choice.
That said, I personally find the SAS "language" to be alternatively bewildering and nostalgia-inducing (the "cards" command, anybody?). SAS is the only language about which I can honestly say "it makes R's syntax look clean and predictable". Also, the Windows version of SAS is an absolute abomination from a UI standpoint. And, their licensing schemes are draconian, and installing the damn thing can easily take an entire day, especially if (say, for example) the installer gets confused because you've already got a JDK installed on your computer. Not that I'm bitter, or anything...
Of course, as others have noted, in bioinformatics, R either is already the default or is almost there. I know that in my department's bioinformatics courses, they use R, Python, and Perl almost exclusively, and only break out the SAS when there's something specific they need it to do.
Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really true that business people use R directly? Being in Forbes is consistent with it... I recall that SQL was intended to be used by business people... and it probably has been, sometimes; but I don't think it happens much. The days of early adoption might have differed, through appealing to the more adventurous business people (as R might be now). One thing I know for a fact: business people use spreadsheets…
How about a spreadsheet that uses R as its scripting language? (There's one of these for Python.)
Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?
#37I would love to use R for my latest project, but as far as I know you can't create a compiled executable for use in a runtime, live web environment. Anybody know of a solution to this issue?
Rserve is an tcp/ip interface to R so you can send R code from any other language. I have used the rserve-ruby interface to some success.
I didn't see a ruby interface - where is it? Also, this doesn't deal with the issue of speed - can R scale to handle, say 100 simultaneous connections?
Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?
#38I'm a non-IT employee (but with a comp-sci background) working in the insurance sector, and I'm currently managing R adoption for a group of about 30 business analysts with minimal programming background. Programming in the business world is screwed up beyond all imagination. The more money a given application is responsible for, the more likely it is that it's a house-of-cards (pun intended for MVS nerds). They're a…
It is surprising how many business people aren't afraid to build monstrous macro-driven spreadsheets, but cringe at the thought of programming. Makes me wonder if it is a UI problem. In the macro spreadsheet, you have data with code tied to it. In the programming world, you generally have code accessing data. The abstractions might just be wrong for business people and a "simple" change could reduce a lot of IT pain.
Ironically, it's a marketing problem.
Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?
#39I wonder - could R in theory be rewritten as a Python library? If not, why not? Is there any special syntax of R that makes it more amenable to statistical analysis than Python? Performance concerns? It's just a shame to see a whole language popping out of something that could just be a library.
There are a few issues. For me two of the most basic are 1) the lack of a ubiquitous NA across all data types and 2) lack of 754 floating point behavior. The lack of custom infix operators is also a bit painful, especially if you view matlab as a competitor. The unquoted formula type is also nice, although you could get some of that by parsing strings.
Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?
#40I'm a non-IT employee (but with a comp-sci background) working in the insurance sector, and I'm currently managing R adoption for a group of about 30 business analysts with minimal programming background. Programming in the business world is screwed up beyond all imagination. The more money a given application is responsible for, the more likely it is that it's a house-of-cards (pun intended for MVS nerds). They're a…
It is surprising how many business people aren't afraid to build monstrous macro-driven spreadsheets, but cringe at the thought of programming. Makes me wonder if it is a UI problem. In the macro spreadsheet, you have data with code tied to it. In the programming world, you generally have code accessing data. The abstractions might just be wrong for business people and a "simple" change could reduce a lot of IT pain.
The reason that spreadsheets are popular is the same reason that many students trying to solve a maths problem immediately plug in the knowns, without rearranging terms first. It's fear of the abstract and comfort of the concrete.