Go R, Young Man

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?"

Comments

Just learn to program

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Just learn to program

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Just learn to program

[Lunix Nutcase]

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

Re:Just learn to program

[EmeraldBot]

"The average person doesn't have that much time to invest if it isn't their career."

I want to agree with you, I really do. But I see this as the biggest problem with our society today.

Coding skills should be a mandatory part of public education.

We don't complain that people don't know how to average a set of numbers, or determine the unit price at the grocery store, then say 'well average people don't have time to learn that stuff' but we try our absolute best to teach EVERYONE such basic skills.

Programming should NOT be any different.

What on earth is a non programmer going to do with that? You're comparing a highly specialized skill that takes years to learn compared to a basic instinctive skill that takes an hour at most. You shouldn't be comparing it to averaging numbers, you should be comparing it to forging. Everyone should learn how to craft a pan from iron! That's not quite an equal, as it actually would help most, but it's close enough. What should be taught is logic - that would actually help people to think systematically. Programming is just an application of that.

Re:Just learn to program

[ubrgeek]

> My biggest fear is we're fostering the next generation of crap coders

Really? Mine's clowns.

Nothing to see here

[phantomfive]

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.......

Re:Nothing to see here

[dinfinity]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that learning Visual Basic and 'programming' in Excel will actually give you an edge on your business professional peers.

Last time I checked, Excel was the hammer of choice for most businesses (maybe combined with SPSS), not R (I'm not sure if any business even uses it).

Ironically, if you focus on Google Spreadsheets, learning Javascript (and the Google APIs) is what is required if you want to do more advanced stuff.

Re:Nothing to see here

[phantomfive]

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.

R is fine if you're in love with statistics

[unimacs]

Otherwise, I'm not sure it's a great choice. For the typical business person who's interested in coding you might as well start with VBA in Excel or Google Apps Script if you've moved away from MS Office to Google's business apps. Google Apps Script is javascript based so you have the advantage of learning something that has other applications.

R is very good at manipulating and plotting data but the charts produced aren't always of the highest quality. They're fine for internal use. There are lots of packages to extend the usefulness of the language but at its heart and soul it's about numbers and plots. It's not really a general purpose language. Just keep that in mind.

Re:R is fine if you're in love with statistics

[spauldo]

Exactly.

For the average person working at a medium-to-large company (or even small ones, really), VBA (or whatever scripting language your office suite uses) will be much more valuable than R.

Back when I still cared about such things, you also could do wrong with stuff like Crystal Reports and learning to actually use MS Access. The PHB doesn't understand code or programming - they don't mean anything to him - but if you can hand him the data that he wants in a beautiful format and make his spreadsheet jump through flaming hoops, he'll be impressed.

R is not a programming language

[rockmuelle]

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

Re:R is not a programming language

[umafuckit]

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.

this is just nonsense.

[rogoshen1]

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?

Re:this is just nonsense.

[circletimessquare]

in school, they expose children to calculus, music, biology, chemistry, physics, sports, etc.

how many become statisticians, jazz trumpters, geneticists, chemical engineers, cosmologists, professional basketball players, etc?

this reasoning "don't teach programming or we will have a glut of substandard programmers", is, i'm sorry, stupid and i am extremely tired of it. it comes from this place of vain smug exclusivity which is self-serving, mindlessly arrogant, and ignorant of the wider world

we must expose programming to every single child in every single school

why?

because it is now a fundamental building block of the world they live in, and they should know the basic ins and outs

just like math, music, sports, chemistry, biology, etc.

and if some of them want to pursue programming? well now you've also clued in some kids you would have missed. some will suck at it even though they pursue it? oh, this is a new concept to you?

is teaching every kid gym mean professional basketball teams have to cope with a glut of bad basketball players? is teaching every kid chemistry mean pharmaceutical companies have to weed through too many substandard chemists? does teaching physics mean NASA and private space companies are suffering due to too many resumes from physics idiots? do you how see fucking ignorant that sounds?

there is no damage, none, zero, and only upside, to more knowledge

and you are an arrogant with a false sense of superiority, the true uneducated one (on matters of basic social reality), if you think otherwise

Mark lead them...

[BlackHawk-666]

...by the nose, straight to his own end goal - a larger pool of cheap labour skilled in the basics needed to produce web applications. By increasing the supply, they can take advantage of market economics to vastly reduce the amount of money they need to offer these people.

I'm not saying they shouldn't learn JavaScript, it's a good place to start and is pretty ubiquitous. It's just lucky for Mark that they are pushing JS and Ruby, very lucky.

Honestly though, saying all those people need to code is like saying I need to learn how to write a sonata in order to listen to music.

Most people would be capable of pushing out a few snippets of code, mostly cribbed from some website - but will flail and cause incalculable damage when they think they have 'da mad skillz bro' and start to write hundreds of lines directly running SQL script from the web page. I've seen the results when an accountant decides their use of Access and Excel means they can code big systems. It wasn't pretty, it broke down frequently, it had dozens of manual steps and adjustments to make each month and it took 5 hours to run. I left that job the second I could.

Re:javascript continues it's relentless march

[Anonymous Coward]

javascript has plenty of obvious, longstanding problems and weaknesses and? who gives a fuck. what language doesn't?

C++ has problems and weaknesses. Java has problems and weaknesses. C# has problems and weaknesses. Python has problems and weaknesses.

JavaScript doesn't have problems and weaknesses, it's a disaster from beginning to end.