Comments on: Love it and hate it, R has come of age https://brenocon.com/blog/2009/01/love-it-and-hate-it-r-has-come-of-age/ cognition, language, social systems; statistics, visualization, computation Tue, 25 Nov 2025 13:11:20 +0000 hourly 1 By: ScottS-M https://brenocon.com/blog/2009/01/love-it-and-hate-it-r-has-come-of-age/#comment-6223 ScottS-M Sun, 17 May 2009 21:18:45 +0000 http://anyall.org/blog/?p=409#comment-6223 Wouldn’t
sample(c(
"OMG OMG, R is now famous?!",
"People used to make fun of me for learning R since Splus is SO OLD!",
"I still hear stories that SAS can do crazy tricks that make me jealous.
But not enough to attempt learning it."
),100,TRUE)
be more R-like? :) Nice article.

]]> By: » Tweets for 2009-04-26 (Dhananjay Nene) https://brenocon.com/blog/2009/01/love-it-and-hate-it-r-has-come-of-age/#comment-5587 » Tweets for 2009-04-26 (Dhananjay Nene) Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:39:12 +0000 http://anyall.org/blog/?p=409#comment-5587 [...] Love it and hate it, R has come of age (Jan 2009) http://anyall.org/blog/2009/01/love-it-and-hate-it-r-has-come-of-age/ # This entry was posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2009 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Tweets. You [...]

]]> By: brendano https://brenocon.com/blog/2009/01/love-it-and-hate-it-r-has-come-of-age/#comment-1876 brendano Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:06:50 +0000 http://anyall.org/blog/?p=409#comment-1876 “R makes hard things easy and easy things hard” => I love it.

(For anyone who doesn’t recognize the reference, it’s to Larry Wall’s design goal for Perl: “Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible.” Or at least that’s what I recognize.)

]]> By: Michael Driscoll https://brenocon.com/blog/2009/01/love-it-and-hate-it-r-has-come-of-age/#comment-1872 Michael Driscoll Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:43:18 +0000 http://anyall.org/blog/?p=409#comment-1872 When is a matrix not a matrix? When it’s a matrix in R that you neglected to include the “drop=N” argument.

I confess to a love-hate relationship with R. It makes hard things easy and easy things hard. Beautiful visualizations of kernel density plots: easy peasy. Straightforward means of working with lists: good luck with that.

Inconsistent syntax. Incomplete documentation. But a vibrant community and still better than anything else I’ve come across.

]]> By: brendano https://brenocon.com/blog/2009/01/love-it-and-hate-it-r-has-come-of-age/#comment-1745 brendano Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:24:17 +0000 http://anyall.org/blog/?p=409#comment-1745 Hm, interesting. Some Risms I just can’t take after knowing normal programming languages — like using dots instead of underscores as separators in variable names.

]]> By: John https://brenocon.com/blog/2009/01/love-it-and-hate-it-r-has-come-of-age/#comment-1726 John Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:50:56 +0000 http://anyall.org/blog/?p=409#comment-1726 It’s great to read a “warts and all” review of R. I’ve used dozens of programming languages, and R has been the hardest for me to learn. But it’s a good tool for what it does well.

I think that part of the problem with R is that many R users only know (or only use) R. They learn it in school and then use it for every task, whether it’s appropriate or not. And since they have nothing to compare it to, they assume the inconsistencies, cryptic names, and so forth are normal. Then when they start to write modules, they write like what they’re used to. I imagine the best R programmers learned to program somewhere else and then started using R.

]]>