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Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?

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Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?

#1

Post by wildanimal »

The R community seems to be growing rapidly, with many favorable reviews of the language/system. For instance --

Forbes Magazine, Names You Need to Know in 2011: R Data Analysis Software: http://blogs.forbes.com/smcnally/2010/11/10/names-you-need-to-know-in-2011-r-data-analysis-software (and links therein)

And some of its developers are suggesting that they scrap it and start over (don't know if the whole "Core Team"'s on board tho'): http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/Compstat-2008-Slides.pdf

Are there parallels like this in the development of other languages/environments/ecosystems (e.g., Python3, Perl6 "revisions")? How do these efforts usually end up (I guess we're still waiting to see about Python3 and Perl6...) -- and how would it affect your business's decision to develop a library in this environment?

Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?

#3

Post by msy »

While there may be a new language that deals with some of the deficiencies of R at an unspecified point in the future, R is here today. It works, it works very well for the tasks it was designed for and is both well written and well supported. Get coding.

Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?

#4

Post by eliben »

I 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.

Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?

#5

Post by goodside »

I'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 always mishmashes of COBOL, SAS, DFSORT, and random proprietary languages that have never been the subject of a third-party book, and were sold to a company that was sold to a company that was sold to CA Technologies back in the 1970s. Whatever these languages can't do is implemented through Escher-painting constructions of Excel references and VBA macros.

So, when people say that R has some issues, I say, "boo fucking hoo".

Most businesses suffer from an unnatural separation between IT and the business end. If business people want something programmed, they call IT. They don't learn Python and do it themselves, because Python is a "programming language". R is the first real language that business people are being encouraged to learn, because it's an "analysis environment". You have no idea how often I have to edit the word "programming" out of my presentations for this reason.

R will win in business because it's decent, and it's been around long enough to not be scary to managers. I'd be cautious about drawing comparisons to other languages that have undergone big design changes, because, as far as I can tell, the existence of a decent language in the business world is entirely without precedent.

(Edit: In case the above came off as sounding like a "non-hackers are idiots" rant, it wasn't meant as such. Many of the people that produce these hideous monstrosities of SAS and VBA code have PhDs in statistics and atmospheric sciences. You can be pretty smart without knowing how to write software well.)

Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?

#7

Post by EventHorizon »

eliben wrote: post #4

I 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.

R is an implementation of S. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_%28programming_language%29 it has its origins in 1975.

Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?

#9

Post by boothead »

eliben wrote: post #4

I 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.

You mean like numpy/scipy/matplot lib?

Re: Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?

#10

Post by cdavid »

eliben wrote: post #4

I 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.

[caveat: I am a numpy/scipy developer]

The idea of rewriting a large body of code in a different language does not make much sense.

Also, being a niche language has some nice consequences:

  * R has been there for a long time through its predecessor S
  * R is a specialized language: little chance to see it being screwed up by some library which wants to change everything, as it happens too often in python
  * Because it is a niche language, its behavior is consistent across platforms (it is just easier to do with R than with python, or other "real" languages).
Note how being a "real" language goes against those advantages. Also, most researchers are very lousy programmers. Often, their software is super smart, but the code quality is awful and write-only. A less powerful language may mitigate those issues
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