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I strongly think that R has outgrown just having statistics as its killer feature. The killer feature of R is data analysis

I have yet to see any software that rivals dplyr, data.table, and ggplot2 in the balance of power and ease of use. It also has all the auxiliary packages you need to fetch your data (DBI, httr, rvest), model it if necessary (parsnip, caret) and visualise it (ggplot2, plotly, shiny)

I know python is more popular here but I would choose R in a heartbeat 19 times out of 20


Is Python especially popular because of its easier learning curve?

Possibly. I think R is actually easier to learn for people who have never studied or done programming before.

1. It's easier to get up and running as RStudio is much more 'batteries included' than other popular IDEs, it's harder to get into the case of multiple different python versions, and you install packages through the R interpreter rather than via pip at the command line

2. I would say R data analysis packages are easier to learn than the python equivalents. Because the dataframe is a native structure in R there has been a lot more packages that have tried alternative syntax approaches to try and find the 'optimal' one. Python has really only had pandas, polars, and pyspark (all of which have implemented their own data structures and therefore have focused more on performance than syntax)

3. This doesn't hold if you're studying a language to be a general purpose programmer. Then python is much better. Anything to avoid the hell of the R standard lib. But if you need to do a bit of coding to analyse data and you've never done any before, my vote would be for R.

However, these are thoughts from my own personal anecdotes rather than any pedagogical theory


I'd also say because of its price (especially vs MATLAB and Mathematica) and the huge ecosystem of libraries for basically every scientific domain.

Those libs likely only exist because of how easy python is to learn. So, snake tail situation maybe.

I haven’t used matlab for 10+ years, but back then Matlab used to provide engineering packages for vibrations and non-linear models approximations, I’d imagine the effort of going Python/ open source code to just to redefine your model for both purposes and then validate and verify the results would be a 10-50 fold cost of paying for a license

Well, a lot of those libraries are C libraries that have Python bindings.

Very cool! Are you planning for there to be a corresponding R package that exposes the high level commands? The popularity of the usethis package really showed the power of keeping people within the R interpreter rather than going back and forth with the terminal. This is so important for a language like R that has so many users without much CS training

Yes! Absolutely in the plans to have a corresponding R package. In the meantime, we've created a `.rv` R environment within rv projects that allow users to call things like `.rv$sync()` and `.rv$add("pkg")` from the console. Our internal user bases is primarily not CS based and have found these functions extremely helpful

A huge number of people. They're a very well selling car


Always thrilled to see another nethack player in the wild!

Been playing on and off for 20 years and have only managed a single ascension in that time!


That’s awesome! I have been playing off and on since 2009!

If you haven’t heard of it, check out The November NetHack Tournament [1]. I played it for the first time in November of last year and almost got a Wizard win (ran out of time) after getting so close with a Monk (got killed by Rodney’s touch of death after he stole my only source of magic resistance).

I’m looking forward to playing again this year!

[1] https://tnnt.org/


Drugs or not, your comment was rude and condescending. And trying to brush it off as people being 'sensitive' doesn't change it being rude and condescending


Totally agree. PySpark, dplyr, or polars any day


How are you measuring 'nice'? How are you measuring 'performant'?

My assumption would be that if you haven't seen anything, even from the creator, then you just have different expectations to the people who do get value from React


It’s interesting I’ve asked this question several times and no one can point me to one. Performant meaning when react is used it’s not at the bottom in speed and latency[1].

[1]: https://infrequently.org/#e-commerce


I was a Masters student when Brit was finishing off her PhD. Awesome scientist and very cool person. So glad to see her continuing in this space!

NIWA is also just a very cool place in general. Have really liked everyone I've met from there.


Cool idea! Looking forward to exploring it this weekend


This is a false dichotomy. There is more than enough room for both languages, and R is not attempting to replace python


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