One could also argue that dataframes are basically in-memory database tables. And in that case, S and SQL probably tie in terms of the creation timeline.
I think this is overblowing the similarities to matrices. Matrices have elements all of the same type, while data.frames mix numbers, characters, factors, etc. You certainly cannot transpose a data.frame and still have a data.frame that makes sense. Multiplying rows would not make sense either, since within one row you will have different types of data. Unless you have a data.frame that is all numeric, but in that case one should probably be using a matrix in the first place.
They still have their advantages with row/column labels, NaN handling etc. These are not operations I am speculating about by the way. I am most familiar with pandas and the dataframe there has transpose, dot product operations and almost all column operations have their correspondence in rows (i.e. you either sum(axis=0) or sum(axis=1)).
Statisticians are funny!
Python is literally designed to be easy to program with in general.
Well, it turns out when you’re dealing with terabytes of data and TFLOPS, the programming becomes more important than the math. Not all R devs are happy about this and they are very loud about it.
But it shouldn’t really surprise anyone. That is literally how those languages are designed.
Most of the R devs I know like this are just butthurt they are paid less and refuse to switch because they’re obstinate, or they’re a little scared they’re being left behind. first group is all over the place, but the second group tends to skew older of course
Look, I started with R and use mostly Python these days, but this is not really a fair take.
R is (still) much, much, much better for analytics and graphing (the only decent plotting library in python is a ggplot clone). The big change (and why Python ended up winning) is that integrating R with other tools (like web stuff, for example) is harder than just using Python.
pandas (for instance) is like an unholy clone of the worst features from both R and Python. Polars is pretty rocking, though (mostly because it clones from Spark/dplyr/linc).
It's another example of Python being the second best language for everything winning out in the marketplace.
That being said, if I was starting a data focused company and needed to pick a language, I'd almost certainly build all the DS focused stuff in R as it would be many many times quicker, as long as I didn't need to hire too many people.
R is fine. The issue is more in the ecosystem (with the aforementioned exception of the tidyverse).
Mainly because R sucks for anything that isn’t statistics.
So so true.
I was working on an adhoc project that needed a quick result by the end of the day. I had to pull this series of parquet files and do some quick and dirty analysis. My first reflex was to use python with pandas, quick and easy. Python could not handle the datasets, too large. I decided to give R and data.table a go and it went smoothly. I am usually a python user but from time to time I feel compelled to jump back to R and data.table. Phenomenal tool.