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by nipun_batra 3820 days ago
I do agree that stats people love R. This is one of the reasons I wrote this article. So that I can leverage all the good work they've gone. It is way better to write a wrapper than to reimplement everything from scratch. I'm coming from academia where I have a lot of systems work. So, I tend to be Python first user. But, I do want to utilise all the packages that are exclusively available in R.

Packaging is improving in Python afaik. People like Anaconda!
1 comments
sandGorgon 3820 days ago
its not packaging per se - conda and gem are brilliant, but its intended for software creators and not math acads. install.package may not be a brilliant piece of software, but its perfect for people who develop stats algorithms and just publish to cran.

This is the package submission page to CRAN - https://cran.r-project.org/submit.html

This is the equivalent for Pypi - https://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=submit_form

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stdbrouw 3820 days ago
Submitting a package is the least important part of distributing it. For CRAN you can use the submit form you link to, for Python it's `python setup.py sdist upload` and you're done. CRAN in fact has much stricter standards for packages than Python -- you need a vignette, you need tests etc. -- which is why new R packages are usually on GitHub long before they make it to CRAN, whereas PyPI is happy to accept alpha and beta releases without documentation and without tests.
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sandGorgon 3820 days ago
thats actually interesting to know - it would be illuminating to find out what really is the mental roadblock there, because this is something I have heard from multiple acads.
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