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by glofish 2382 days ago
Here are some fun links:

https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2012/06/08/r-the-master-trol...

https://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf

and many others.

I have come to believe that the only people that think R is ok are those that are either:

- beginners that just passed the newbie state, learned a few tricks and feel empowered

- actual experts - that fully understand the minute details of the implementation and data models

I have been using R on and off for a decade, as soon as I stop using for a few months getting back is like a tar pit where I am continuously caught off guard by the myriad of ridiculous problems. Paradoxically as you get better with R your errors start becoming more dangerous, your code starts silently doing the wrong things.

R is unlike any other programming language that I have used before (also on an off) from Perl, C to Python and Java. None of these programming languages have such in incredibly obtuse and illogical and trippy design.

1 comments

> I have come to believe that the only people that think R is ok are those that are either:

You can virtually say the same thing for every programming language that is made to be easy to learn by hiding complexity, like Python or Ruby.