Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by spinningslate 2544 days ago
Agreed. R might not have the breadth of Python, and it's less conventional as a language (procedural, vector based).

It has some key strengths though:

1. RStudio IDE as you note. It's a really great, focused IDE for doing most of the things people do with R.

2. Shiny. Such a well conceived and constructed toolkit for building interactive apps

3. The package ecosystem: lots of really good quality, high performance packages

4. RStudio the company, who contribute a lot to the community - both open source (RStudio IDE, Shiny, tidyverse, ...) and commercial (RSConnect, Package Manager).

From a language design pov I like Julia over Python over R. But for number-heavy computing I prefer the R ecosystem overall.
2 comments
kgwgk 2544 days ago
One of the packages created by RStudio is reticulate, which allows integration with python. They have also recently added some support for python to the IDE:

https://rstudio.github.io/reticulate/articles/rstudio_ide.ht...

link
0xd171 2544 days ago
On the other hand, base R has to maintain (some degree of?) compatibility with S. Which means that all the strange design choices and weird behaviour in base R have little hope of ever changing. No number of additional packages can fix this.
link
tylermw 2544 days ago
There is one nice thing about R core's focus on maintaining backwards compatibility, however: code from a decade ago (more often than not) will run without a hiccup on current versions of R.

Related tweets:

https://twitter.com/hrbrmstr/status/1124016682413039616

https://twitter.com/hrbrmstr/status/1122186751987073025

link