[avs733]

I am in an almost identical situation, just still in the PhD stage.

I moved from Matlab (originally a mechanical engineer) and the biggest shock was documentation and just the internal help stuff in general. The help files on a regular basis require you to understand how something works to understand the thing explaining how it works.

I am often just shocked at little quirks I find trying to do things in R, not that it is worse than SATA of SAS but the goals was to be better. I am all for FOSS, and R provides many extensive capabilities not available in Matlab, but in terms of being user friendly Matlab is so superior it is honestly sad. Oh and '<-' just drives me nuts...I will never understand the choice of two characters where one is entirely sufficient.

[S4M]

> Oh and '<-' just drives me nuts...I will never understand the choice of two characters where one is entirely sufficient.

It's true that '<-' is a strange choice, but you can use '=' for variable assignments as well.

[avs733]

true

[jghn]

Iirc it comes from the old APL keyboard

[snaky]

That may be not a bad idea to get an APL keyboard actually, considering there are R interop interfaces for DyalogAPL, APLX and J.

[avs733]

well thank you, I always appreciate someone teaching me something :)

[jghn]

np. As was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, S is a pretty ancient language so R brings along some baggage with it :)