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A comment on Generalizing Support for Functional OOP in R. Parent comment

Re:Generalizing Support for Functional OOP in R by mr_toad on Tuesday May 28, 2024 @07:06PM (#40506536)
Maybe too expressive and too flexible? Different R programs can have wildly different dialects, making it difficult for two R programmers to even understand each other.

I’ve seen comics depicting the learning curve for R as having local minima beyond which there are further peaks and troughs of knowledge. A beginner might learn enough to get by, but find the code of someone on the other side of one of those peaks to be a foreign language.

Having your coders not understand each other is problematic in a production environment.

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Re:Generalizing Support for Functional OOP in R by orhmeh09 on Tuesday May 28, 2024 @07:38PM (#40506729)
This is fair. For what it's worth, Python is tending toward this and I think is introducing newer syntax at a faster rate with things such as structural pattern matching and typing, which I have had difficulty explaining to people who don't keep up with each new release.
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Re:Generalizing Support for Functional OOP in R by stevenae on Wednesday May 29, 2024 @09:27AM (#40511767)
Switching from R to Python, this resonates. I write base (non-tidy) R, and it's definitely another language from tidy. That said, having written a fair amount of base Python, jumping into torch/tensor flow feels like an even further separation than base R/tidy.
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