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A comment on R, the master troll of statistical languages (2012). Parent comment

Re:R, the master troll of statistical languages (2012) by jasonpbecker on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @02:25PM (#5451121)
R works really remarkably well and clearly for folks who work in this domain day to day. It's easier to learn than a lot of other languages for people who are coming from subject knowledge and need to program to implement that knowledge.

It may be a terrible language by some objective external computer science criteria. But as a domain specific language, that's not really important. What is important is that the domain specific aspect works well for people with domain knowledge.

It's not the right tool for every job or every person, but it's incredibly expressive for people working with a specific set of problems.

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Re:R, the master troll of statistical languages (2012) by Locke1689 on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @02:46PM (#5451229)
What you're talking about is the environment. R seems to have a very nice environment -- a lot of people have written libraries for it and it is popular among the community.

I was quite clearly criticizing the language, which is bad. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use it if it's the best option for your use case, just that it's bad.

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