Re:ARrgh: a newcomer's angry guide to R (2013)
by hadley on Sunday December 14, 2014 @11:17PM
(#8750649)
The whole R sucks as a language thing is getting pretty old. There is some things that R is really good at, there are some things that Python is really good at. Just because R comes from a somewhat unusual ancestry (firmly rooted in functional programming with immutable data structures and generic function style OO) doesn't make it bad.
Re:ARrgh: a newcomer's angry guide to R (2013)
by jzwinck on Monday December 15, 2014 @04:09AM
(#8751187)
As recently as a few months ago, R used a form of "reference counting" which only allowed three values in the counter: 0, 1, and 2 [1]. This might be caused by unusual ancestry or it might not, but it's hard to stop saying R sucks when it does that in 2014.
Re:ARrgh: a newcomer's angry guide to R (2013)
by hadley on Monday December 15, 2014 @02:28PM
(#8753827)
It still does that. But it's an optimization for editing in place, not related to gc
Re:ARrgh: a newcomer's angry guide to R (2013)
by joyofdata on Monday December 15, 2014 @04:55AM
(#8751284)
Actually having lots of people complain about a programming language is a good indicator for that language doing well:
- JavaScript
- PHP
- C++
- ...
On that note, Hadley, R IS awesome and a large reason for that is your contribution to it! Thanks and keep up the good work!
I would be far more excited about the possibilities created by a cornucopia of new stats/dataviz functionality built into Python than I would be about some packages that make R a bit less terrible to write.