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Big Book of R

(www.bigbookofr.com)
288 points sebg | 1 comments | 10 Apr 25 17:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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uptownfunk ◴[10 Apr 25 21:33 UTC] No.43648229[source]▶
I will say, now after 15 years messing with this. With LLM I just do it all in Python. But, I still miss the elegance and simplicity of R for data manipulation and analysis. Especially the dplyr semantics. They really nailed it. I think they got crushed by the namespace / import system. There’s something about R that makes you so fluid and intuitive. But the engineering, the efficiency, I get with Python now, I can’t go back.
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dkga ◴[11 Apr 25 05:14 UTC] No.43650701[source]▶
I agree with all your comment… except the very last bit. Do you really find python to be more efficient at engineering stuff than R? And especially speed, which in my experience at least is broadly the same if not faster with R because it interages easier with Rust and C++?
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1. uptownfunk ◴[12 Apr 25 05:45 UTC] No.43661670[source]▶
On further reflection I think the sweet spot for R for me Has always been prototyping and exploration. Where you don’t exactly know what the logic needs to be, or how the data needs to be cut to get at what you want. So that rapid type of exploration R is really really good at. Closer to math for me than software engineering. And if I had a job where I could just do that all day I’d be pretty happy at this point in my life. and you can’t use a pivot table Google sheets or excel to get at the cut you want or the logic is too complex to do in Google sheets. So for that sweet spot, which is still a broad niche, R is excellent and shines.