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Go R, Young Man

Posted by timothy on from the or-certain-other-letters dept.

theodp (442580) writes " Learning to code has become a mainstream fascination," writes Brian Liou in Why are YOU learning to code?, "but all the evangelization has been misleading. The problem in our Chris-Bosh-codes-so-should-you society is that people learn to code without first asking "for what purpose do you want to use code?" What in your day-to-day work could you actually automate using code? Let's face it, your odds of creating the next hot iPhone app aren't great, but the spreadsheets you look at everyday or the strategic business decisions you or your company makes? Coding can help you with those. Coding to better understand data would help everyone." Leada co-founder Liou's advice? "So to all non-technical professionals looking to get technical: If you want to become a software engineer, by all means learn Ruby or go through the JavaScript tutorials on Codecademy. But if you're simply a business professional looking to gain an edge on your peers, trust me, you are much better off learning R." So, did Mark Zuckerberg steer 100 million K-12 coder wannabes down the wrong path with the JavaScript and Ruby preaching?"

8 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Just learn to program by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Language is not relevant, as long as you don't just learn one.

    1. Re:Just learn to program by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      1) You have to choose a programming language to learn with. You don't learn to program in a vacuum.
      2) A non-technical person doesn't want to learn tons of programming languages especially when they have no relevance to their business. Hence the suggestion of the article writer that they focus on something like R over Ruby/Javascript since it's likely to have more relevance to them.

    2. Re:Just learn to program by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Most people don't have the time to sink into learning multiple programming languages. Especially when programming isn't their career.

  2. Nothing to see here by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

    CEO of data analysis company suggests people learn data analysis language.

    In other news, CEO of Erlang Solutions thinks Erlang is great. No word on why.......

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:Nothing to see here by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's silly because "if you're simply a business professional looking to gain an edge on your peers," then R is not the language to choose. He said it because he's trying to raise the profile of his company (which is what CEOs and co-founders do).

      Now, if he had a well reasoned argument to support his choice, I would be really interested in reading it, but I can't find it among the maze of links in the summary. Incidentally, his company offers courses in R, so if you've recently decided you want to learn it because the co-founder of a startup recommended it, there's a convenient place you can go to learn it.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  3. R is not a programming language by rockmuelle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's a statistical computing environment. R is much closed to what VB was pre-VB6 - a loosely defined domain specific language with lots of libraries aimed at a specific task. It's not really a general purpose programming language and not a great one to learn if you want to learn to program.

    If you do a lot of number crunching and want to move beyond Excel, R is a great choice (as is matlab, s-plus, or any of the others aimed at analytics).

    If you do analytics AND want to learn to program, go Python and NumPy/Pandas.

    If you just want to learn to program, VB, JavaScript, Python, Java are all good. Just find what you'd like to program and see what languages people are using.

    And yes, at some point, pick up a few more languages if you find you like programming.

    -Chris

    1. Re:R is not a programming language by umafuckit · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly. Terrible as a programming language. Telling someone to learn R is basically the same as telling someone to learn statistics and analyse their data properly.

      --
      soylentnews.org
  4. this is just nonsense. by rogoshen1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is just taking the facile view that coding is a means to an end. Step 1: learn to code Step 2: ???? Step 3: 90k year job at a startup. =/

    It's no different than saying "all the good jobs require a college degree, therefore we should put EVERYONE through college, then everyone will get good jobs". No.

    Telling kids that the key to getting a good job is by learning ruby, or JS, or whatever language; is just going to create an environment where there's a glut of substandard ruby and JS coders out there.

    If you want kids to be successful, teach them to learn, and to think for themselves -- their interest and ambition is what will be the deciding factor, not cramming CS-lite education down their throats. Because, you can create shitty developers out of people who have no interest in the field, and are only there for a paycheck... but what's the point?