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by glofish
2382 days ago
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try loading up any scientific package and you'll see how, in turn loads up other and other packages, in bioinformatics you can easily add up to dozens if not a hundred of dependencies, each written in R by people with questionable skills. there is no escape. When I said "colleagues" I really meant the entire scientific field runs on untold lines of buggy R code, so obtuse, so cryptic, that the task of debugging or even tracing what is going on is practically impossible. And you can't debug it because it is this awful R code everywhere! And when the code breaks it does not break like normal programming language do, with an error or exception or even a stack dump. No! Most of the time your R code will just start silently doing the wrong thing. |
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>try loading up any scientific package and you'll see how, in turn loads up other and other packages, in bioinformatics you can easily add up to dozens if not a hundred of dependencies
That's not necessarily a bad thing unless you're trying to run R on embedded or some other constrained environment.
>When I said "colleagues" I really meant the entire scientific field runs on untold lines of buggy R code, so obtuse, so cryptic
I can't recall the last time I've bumped into a bug in an R library. I'm sure they exist but thankfully the ecosystem is quite stable.
>that the task of debugging or even tracing what is going on is practically impossible.
Debugging in R is easier than most languages. I'm unsure where you're getting your facts from.
>And when the code breaks it does not break like normal programming language do, with an error or exception or even a stack dump. No! Most of the time your R code will just start silently doing the wrong thing.
It's no worse than Python in this regard. R isn't particularly bad in this area, but it's certainly no C++.
I'm going back to guessing it's because R is FPP. That's R's dirtiest and most offensive part to the uninitiated.