Interviews: Ask Author and Programmer Andy Nicholls About R

Andy Nicholls has been an R programmer and consultant for Mango Solutions since 2011 (where he currently manages the R consultancy team), after a long stint as a statistician in the pharmaceutical industry. He has a serious background in mathematics, too, with a Masters in math and another in Statistics with Applications in Medicine. Andy has taught more than 50 on-site R training courses and has been involved in the development of more than 30 R packages; he's also a regular contributor to events at LondonR, the largest R user group in the UK. But since not everyone can get to London for a user group meeting, you can get some of the insights he's gained as an R expert in Sams Teach Yourself R In 24 Hours (available in print or at Safari), of which he is the lead author. Today, though, you can ask Andy about the much-lauded statistics-oriented free software (GPL) language directly -- Why to use it, how to get started, how to get things done, and where those intriguing release names come from. (The about page is helpful, too.) As usual, please ask as many questions as you'd like, but one question at a time, please. Note: Slashdot is always looking for interesting interview guests. Who do you want to ask? Let us know!

Comments

Future of R, now that programmers use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your take on the future of R? It used to be that it was a tool for statisticians, and now it's been discovered by programmers. As a statistician who's not a programmer, but who hangs out sometimes on slashdot and stackoverflow, it feels sometime like it's in danger of becoming just another language for programmers, instead of a tool for statisticians. Should I be worried? Can it be both? Is this mass inflow of programmers going to change it somehow? Or am I just having a "get off my lawn" moment?

More about me, I'm a PhD statistician at a major public research university, and use R every day for data manipulation, exploration, and analysis, and have for 10+ years. I've done a few packages and enough coding that I know most of R's quirks, but would not consider myself a programmer.

Re:Future of R, now that programmers use it?

[Pseudonym]

As a statistician who's not a programmer, but who hangs out sometimes on slashdot and stackoverflow, it feels sometime like it's in danger of becoming just another language for programmers, instead of a tool for statisticians.

As a programmer who used to research programming languages, here's no danger of that at all.

It's not much of a stretch to say that no programmer really uses R. At most, programmers use the high-quality statistical libraries which only work with R. R is basically the best statistical packages every written bound together by one of the worst programming languages ever developed.