Re:Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?
by CuriouslyC on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @05:18PM
(#37314266)
R is great when your data is already together in one place and homogenous/processed. In that instance the workflow using dplyr/ggplot is better. R the language is hot garbage though, and the libraries available for doing random things that aren't working with certain data structures, doing math or plotting are generally much worse than their python equivalents. That is the reason python dominates data engineering, and why it's pushing R out everywhere but academia.
R will still have a solid place in industrial pharma for a long time (even as python growths, R growth will continue. R is pretty tightly intertwined with the process of processing and submitting data from clinical trials to the FDA, much to SAS's chagrin.
Personally I think we have to accept that R, Python, Java, C++, and Go are going to be with us for the rest of our lives. I would expect PHP, Ruby, and Perl to go away much faster. Rust is still in question.
Re:Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?
by eep_social on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @07:07PM
(#37315371)
Rails is probably going to keep Ruby relevant for a lot longer than Perl. I might go as far as to predict that Ruby will be the new COBOL or FORTRAN - widely used but neither cheap nor easy to find someone to modify it.
Are you from the future? R is making progress to replacing SAS in pharma, but has a long ways to go. Here is an article from last year[0] patting themselves on the back for making a R submission to the FDA. There are oodles of existing processes where data has to be formatted just so because that is how SAS does it. Nobody wants to rip up and re-validate that code until they must.
[0] https://www.r-consortium.org/blog/2022/03/16/update-successf...
The trope about SAS being required is pretty old... people trotted that out when I last worked in pharma ~15 years ago. The FDA specifically released an article saying that R is perfectly acceptable for submission https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/06/fda-r-ok.html
Please don't spread the SAS FUD. I work in Pharma and talk to the statisticians all the time.
I currently work in pharma, and I can point to teams of SAS programmers. There are definitely R efforts, and I have no doubt it is the eventual future, but it is not yet here.
If there is anything in R that is better, it could be ported. It's kind of different from language intrinsics that can't be easily ported. In fact I think there's a great argument for writing a standardized data processing and visual representation layer in C++, and then making it usable from all the languages.
It would be nice if this was true for the notebook layer.
Re:Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?
by disgruntledphd2 on Wednesday August 30, 2023 @05:26AM
(#37319440)
It's the domain knowledge that's difficult. Like the example up thread about the lack of generalised additive models. The version in R was written originally by the developers of the method. There's no Python version because no one with sufficient expertise has ported it.
Don't get me wrong, I know mostly write Python because it's a better general purpose language but there are big big tradeoffs.
Not intrinsic to the language but in terms of the ecosystem, for a purely A-type data science workload R is significantly better. dplyr + ggplot vs. pandas + matplotlib isn't even remotely close.
Now, obviously in the real world nothing is ever purely model work, which is why Python more than makes up for the difference.
> I don't want a "data/scientific" language, or a "web" language, or a "UI" language- I want one language that explicitly supports all the usecases well-enough.
Me neither. *taps sign*
>> The difference is that Python doesn't entirely suck as a general-purpose language.