Re:A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R
by shawnz on Thursday June 14, 2018 @02:48AM
(#17309830)
> Their concerns are generally valid, but they should keep in mind a lot of people using do not have a software development background and do not care that the language is not elegantly designed: they just want to get analytical work done.
This implies we strive for good design in languages just because it appeases some ideal we have about how languages should be. But really we strive for good design in languages because it makes them more powerful, more expressive, easier to use, etc. Sure, maybe Python doesn't have all the right abstractions to be perfectly suited to statistical tasks, whereas R has more natural abstractions for that kind of stuff. But that doesn't mean that R doesn't also have many objectively bad design decisions even for statistical uses.
This implies we strive for good design in languages just because it appeases some ideal we have about how languages should be. But really we strive for good design in languages because it makes them more powerful, more expressive, easier to use, etc. Sure, maybe Python doesn't have all the right abstractions to be perfectly suited to statistical tasks, whereas R has more natural abstractions for that kind of stuff. But that doesn't mean that R doesn't also have many objectively bad design decisions even for statistical uses.