Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

R adds native pipe and lambda syntax

developer.r-project.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 150 posts

Re: R adds native pipe and lambda syntax

#91

Post by RussianCow »

saeranv wrote: post #89

Question by someone who is ignorant but interested in functional programming: what is the closest equivalent to these functions in Python? (Or correct me if I'm asking the wrong question). I used to love using lambdas in Python, along with map/reduce/filter but for whatever reason the Python community has turned against it. Map and filter can now be nicely done with list comprehensions, although I still haven't found…

I'm not sure what specific "functions" you're talking about, but Python generally encourages a procedural style of programming as opposed to functional. The rationale is that functional code can be really difficult to read if you aren't already familiar with the idioms and terminology, whereas it's pretty easy to mentally parse and understand a `for` loop. So in that sense, list comprehensions are about as far as Python goes in that direction; there is no syntactic equivalent to the pipe operator, and no way to write reduce or similar operations as succinctly as you can in functional languages.

Re: R adds native pipe and lambda syntax

#92

Post by vizzier »

RussianCow wrote: post #91
saeranv wrote: post #89

Question by someone who is ignorant but interested in functional programming: what is the closest equivalent to these functions in Python? (Or correct me if I'm asking the wrong question). I used to love using lambdas in Python, along with map/reduce/filter but for whatever reason the Python community has turned against it. Map and filter can now be nicely done with list comprehensions, although I still haven't found…

I'm not sure what specific "functions" you're talking about, but Python generally encourages a procedural style of programming as opposed to functional. The rationale is that functional code can be really difficult to read if you aren't already familiar with the idioms and terminology, whereas it's pretty easy to mentally parse and understand a `for` loop. So in that sense, list comprehensions are about as far as Pyt…

And just in brief as to what the pipe generally does without the syntax available. If you have functions x and y which take 1 argument. Where |> is the piping syntax

y(1) |> x would be equivalent to x(y(1)) in python.

Re: R adds native pipe and lambda syntax

#94

Post by amelius »

wenc wrote: post #6

I'm sure some of us who are out of the loop might be wondering: what about the magrittr pipe operator (%>%) that we all know and love? Luke Tierney explains the move from %>% to a native pipe |> here [1]. The native pipe aims to be more efficient as well as addresses issues with the magrittr pipe like complex stack traces. Turns out the |> syntax is also used in Julia, Javascript and F#. The lambda syntax (\(x) -> x…

> The lambda syntax (\(x) -> x + 1) is similar to Haskell's (\x -> x + 1).

Personally I think it would be a good idea if you could e.g. configure your keyboard so that AltGr+L produces λ, which you can then use in place of \

But alas, the Haskell community has decided against this:

https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/1102

Re: R adds native pipe and lambda syntax

#95

Post by free2OSS »

zwaps wrote: post #83
Huntsecker wrote: post #24

personally Im surprised R is still in active development when the main use case for people to use R (at least when I was using it) was for statistical analysis. Python with its libraries (a lot I believe ported from R) just does is nicer, and faster.

I use Python whenever I can, but R has loads and loads of statistical libraries that Pyrhon doesn’t. It is not even close.

What kind of stat problems?

Also I used to love Python... Until I got a full time job and learned why static typing exists.

Re: R adds native pipe and lambda syntax

#96

Post by kaitai »

civilized wrote: post #88
identity0 wrote: post #86

I wish more languages gave us a "|>" operator. Too many languages settle with dot notation, which confuses encapsulation/method calling with syntactical convenience.

This, along with inferior metaprogramming affordances, is the biggest reason pandas will never be as productive an analyst tool as R's dplyr. In R you can pipe anything into anything. In pandas you're stuck with the methods pandas gives you. This is also why pandas API is so bloated. A lot of pandas special-case functionality, like dropping duplicate rows, can be replicated in R by chaining together more flexible and…

As someone who is now bouncing back & forth between Python and R on a weekly basis, I've been surprised (after making fun of R sometimes) how much I miss the piping when I leave R for Python. Pandas seems so inflexible by comparison, so nitpicky for little gain. I've been surprised again and again how much dplyr supports near-effortless fluency and productivity.

Never really thought I'd be writing that in a public forum.

Re: R adds native pipe and lambda syntax

#97

Post by smabie »

civilized wrote: post #88
identity0 wrote: post #86

I wish more languages gave us a "|>" operator. Too many languages settle with dot notation, which confuses encapsulation/method calling with syntactical convenience.

This, along with inferior metaprogramming affordances, is the biggest reason pandas will never be as productive an analyst tool as R's dplyr. In R you can pipe anything into anything. In pandas you're stuck with the methods pandas gives you. This is also why pandas API is so bloated. A lot of pandas special-case functionality, like dropping duplicate rows, can be replicated in R by chaining together more flexible and…

I think the obvious limitations of Python is a big reason, but probably not the main reason why Pandas isn't orthogonal. The reason why Pandas is such an ungodly mess is because it must be, in order to be even halfway efficient. When you do try to compose things, or even have the audacity to use a python lambda or an if statement or whatever, you suddenly suffer a 100x slowdown in performance.

Julia doesn't have these problems, and I've found it so much nicer to use for data analysis. You can even call Python libs, if you really have to.

Re: R adds native pipe and lambda syntax

#98

Post by smabie »

kaitai wrote: post #96
civilized wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, along with inferior metaprogramming affordances, is the biggest reason pandas will never be as productive an analyst tool as R's dplyr. In R you can pipe anything into anything. In pandas you're stuck with the methods pandas gives you. This is also why pandas API is so bloated. A lot of pandas special-case functionality, like dropping duplicate rows, can be replicated in R by chaining together more flexible and…

As someone who is now bouncing back & forth between Python and R on a weekly basis, I've been surprised (after making fun of R sometimes) how much I miss the piping when I leave R for Python. Pandas seems so inflexible by comparison, so nitpicky for little gain. I've been surprised again and again how much dplyr supports near-effortless fluency and productivity. Never really thought I'd be writing that in a public fo…

I'm not an R user, but you should try Julia for data analysis. It seems as flexibility (maybe more) than R, while also having blazing performance.

I do like Pandas concept of row indices, which I know Julia (and I believe, R) lack.

Re: R adds native pipe and lambda syntax

#99

Post by smabie »

hated wrote: post #32
civilized wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it's not nicer. dplyr is way better than pandas. But there is no end to the supply of Python fanbois who only know Python and assume that whatever's in Python just has to be better

Pandas is used in some top 10 banks for analytics. Its performance is abysmal at the scale used there. Nobody wants to invest resources in training analysts to write high performance code so here we are. I have never viewed SQL more highly after seeing the mess that analysts make when writing imperative code.

Pandas/python is amazingly prevalent at trading firms. And everyday, we bitch about the performance, we bitch about the stupid API, we bitch about the GIL, the lack of expressiveness. The list goes on and on. But for some braindead reason, we never switch to Julia. It's masochistic.
Post reply on HN