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A comment on Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics by dxbydt on Friday January 23, 2015 @02:29PM (#8936731)
If you get it to run on Linux or OS X, there would be no shortage of buyers, including the company I work at. R is our primary toolset. I spend 4-5 hours per day in R studio, & it could certainly use some beefing up - handling large dataframes without borking, simple Charts button rather than the ggplot2 ceremony, tighter integration with hadoop... My workflow currently is - run a bunch of Scalding jobs to mapreduce few hundred GB on hadoop, then pull the results into R, deep dive analysis, some ML ( CART & the like ) to see if we can influence customer behavior & improve retention & conversion. If I could fire up R in Visual Studio & do all this, I'd definitely spring for it.
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Re:Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics by smortaz on Friday January 23, 2015 @05:21PM (#8937697)
thx dxbydt. VS itself isnt xplat of course, but who knows where things will end up now that Azure is a big focus. note that VS does provide more & more linux support (eg PTVS does remote debug).

also chances are you wont have to spring for it as VS (community edition) is free :).

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Re:Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics by 100timesthis on Friday January 23, 2015 @06:10PM (#8937967)
honest question and I really don't want to start a language war, I just want to understand more. Why do you use R when you can use Python? I tryed R and I hate it because for me it feels like something all patched together, without a principles behind. Is it like that for you as well but you need all those libraries or it's just me?
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Re:Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics by jfolson on Friday January 23, 2015 @07:31PM (#8938268)
For me, productivity. For maintaining large projects or building applications, I'd absolutely go with Scala or Python, but I cannot be as productive in other languages. R has performance issues, but once you know it, you can avoid them (see the recent dplyr benchmarks ~2x faster than pandas).
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Re:Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics by 100timesthis on Friday January 23, 2015 @08:28PM (#8938452)
thanks for the reply. I'm really not bothered with performance, at the end the difference is not that much anyway, what really horrify me is how is it programmed. I remember I wanted to do a statistical test and I could get back the sample size or the p-value calling the same function but with different arguments. I am not a programmer (learned doing my job) but that really disturbed me, even now, writing this. I guess it's just me, as it seems that R is getting more and more attention.
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Re:Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics by hadley on Saturday January 24, 2015 @10:13AM (#8939748)
In my opinion the majority of code in R is extremely well suited to its domain. That means it does not look like the python code you are used to, and I'd recommend learning more about why R works the way it does, e.g. at http://adv-r.had.co.nz
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