Don't Enforce R as a Standard

Re:Don't Enforce R as a Standard by hadley on Friday April 03, 2015 @08:25PM (#9319368)

If you want people to understand your code, you need to treat it like writing: rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. The language itself is almost irrelevant: you can write horrible code in Python and beautiful code in R.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't Enforce R as a Standard by rjurney on Friday April 03, 2015 @09:48PM (#9319569)

True, but if you write decent or so-so Python code, it is readable to anyone who knows a C like language. So-so R code is still impenetrable.

The language matters. One is optimized for ... honestly I have no idea what R is optimized for. I don't think R works that way. It just is. Python though, its optimized for readability.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't Enforce R as a Standard by hadley on Friday April 03, 2015 @10:46PM (#9319714)

Badly written R is impenetrable. So is badly written R. I suspect your standards for so-so R code are vastly different to mine.

R and Python really are very similar as languages. R is more functional, but that shouldn't impede your ability to understand code (once you master some of the basic idioms of FP)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't Enforce R as a Standard by rjurney on Friday April 03, 2015 @11:37PM (#9319802)

I can't actually comment on what is good/bad R code, because I've never seen any R code beyond a few lines that I could follow.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't Enforce R as a Standard by x0x0 on Friday April 03, 2015 @10:43PM (#9319707)

python is optimized for readability to C programmers

R is optimized for statisticians

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't Enforce R as a Standard by an_d_rew on Friday April 03, 2015 @08:43PM (#9319417)

Actually, no. I have written several modules and packages in R, both native and C++, and it is impossible to write efficient R that is beautiful or even comprehensible.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't Enforce R as a Standard by craigching on Friday April 03, 2015 @09:24PM (#9319508)

Hopefully you know the parent was Hadley Wickham who has very much contributed to the readability and beauty of R. So much so that even Python data scientists are lamenting that their code is not quite as beautiful as the "hadley stack" [1]

FWIW, I've done both Python and R and they both have their pluses and minuses, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I've seen some R packages that do, indeed, make R beautiful, case in point, the dplyr package from Hadley Wickham. I'd love to see the future of R be inspired by dplyr and ggplot.

[1] -- http://technology.stitchfix.com/blog/2015/03/17/grammar-of-d...

[ Parent | on HN ]