Re:Why do we use R rather than Excel?
by fighterpilot on Sunday July 11, 2021 @10:52AM
(#27801292)
It's the visualization of logic that I'm thinking of. You can press F2 on a cell and visually see what data is being pulled into the function, and you can easily manually check that that single calculation is accurate by re-creating that calculation by hand, and then infer that all the other stuff in the column is also accurate.
For anything very complicated though, I'd prefer R, as Excel eventually gets unwieldy. Although, I'm saying that from the perspective of being a reasonably experienced coder. The majority of the population should just use Excel, especially in a work context in non-technical teams. No matter how much you push for R, other people in the team aren't going to see the value and aren't going to go along with it, and your R code will be useless after you've left.
To me, R seems more easily inspectable, as all the logic of a program is visible just by looking at text files, where in Excel it's hidden "under the surface", you have to click on cells, look at what's there, go click on other cells that relate to it, remember what you were looking at in the first one that's now invisible, etc.