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The Power of the R Programming Language
BartlebyScrivener writes "The New York Times has an article on the R programming language. The Times describes it as: 'a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.'"
I guess I was thinking of analysts using Excel to develop "complicated" statistical analyses. Sure, Excel is unbeatable at handling small, tabular datasets and doing basic or even considerable arithmetic with them.
When it comes to do more elaborate analysis, using Excel IS reinventing the wheel. Plus, it is IMPOSSIBLE to understand later.
Actually that wasn't why I used R, just a fun addendum. The reason to use R is the huge body of statistics, data mining and graphics facilities. Superb.
Of course, the problem with any statistical library is you have to turn your brain on first. Nothing produces "Garbage in Garbage out" quite like statistical analysis.
With R you tend to need to spend far more time thinking about why you are doing something, and what the answer means than in say vanilla C/Ruby programming.
Which is actually not a Bad Thing at all.
The worse thing about R programming is its name. Googling for "R" turns up way to much noise and way too little signal.
Has Microsoft corrected its percentile function? Or does it still put the largest datum in the 100th percentile, as well as assign fractional percentiles?
I remember once years ago freaking my colleagues out with a largish app written in R... with nary a loop anywhere.
That's a feature of functional languages, a class that also includes Scheme and XSLT. The basic idea is that programs should not have state, because state makes them harder to debug. A for or while loop, by definition, has state, so you have to do your iteration some other way, namely Tail Recursion.
I suppose that makes sense, but I've never been able to teach myself to think that way. It's the main reason I never managed to get through The Wizard Book.
I wish it had a more googleable name. It's hard to search for help. The signal to noise ratio is low.
(a) it allows for easy access of Fortran and C library routines
(b) it allows you to pass large blobs of data by name
(c) it makes it easy to pass data to and from your own compiled C and Fortran routines
So, it's exactly like Python, except with an outdated 1970's syntax that was frankly pretty weird to start with :-)
I've used R, and found it useful for some of its relatively esoteric capabilities, but currently use it almost exclusively via rpy now, the Python binding to R.
Furthermore, I've been using it less in recent years as the native statistical capability of Python has continued to improve. I can appreciate that people who work strictly in data analysis could find R an appropriate tool, but as someone whose work spans multiple areas, from analysis to application design and development, R is too limiting a tool, and using it always feels a little alien and weird.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I use LabView on a daily basis. I hate it.
My coworkers like it and what they seem to have in common is that they either don't know any other languages or aren't proficient in them.
It is a language that aims to be very simple by removing as much typed code as possible. Because of this you will spend stupid amounts of time moving little wires around and trying to make your code not look like a tangled mess. And good luck changing it later.
Since there are no functions and the only way to reuse code is to put it in a different file people tend not to do this. So if you want to use part of someone else's code you will usually have to copy and paste into a different file and spend a bunch of time reconnecting wires and dealing with references to variables you won't have access to in the new file.
The visual style is also, in my opinion, much harder to read than typed code. If I'm trying to figure out some sort of formula it's easier to read it as text than try to figure out where all these wires are coming from that are connected to little "+" and "-" terminals. Also, since comments take space they tend to be short and are usually missing in more complicated sections because it's harder to route the wires around them. And control structures quickly make code virtually unreadable.
There's also the part about writing most of your code with a mouse. Do you really enjoy having to navigate through a series of menus to do anything?
It has plenty of other annoying behaviors.
If you try to access an array element out of range it just gives you the default value for that data type rather than giving some indication that something is wrong.
There is an option to automatically build an array as the output of a loop, but no way to make it *not* add a value to the array. Like when you hit a terminating condition for the loop or some value you want to skip. If you have these situations you either have to modify the array afterwards or build the array manually.
I agree with your and the GP's analysis of LabView, which is why I use LabWindows: it's basically LabView's user interface connected to standard C, hence totally deterministic. But two things about LabView ensure its future: it's close to the way of thinking of electronicians and also it deploys very well on multicore processors (and probably on distributed architectures as well).
Non-Linux Penguins ?