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by jhokanson
2214 days ago
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Besides focusing on language 1 vs language 2 I think the author is also highlighting just how hard it is for people to get started in any language. You mentioned R/Rstudio .... I just wanted to work through an example in a book that I'm reading that has corresponding R code. I type require(package_name) into the command window and that doesn't work. I look at the help for "require" and there is nothing about how to install packages - I would think a reference to the install packages command would be useful (they link to how to check, but nothing obvious on how to install, maybe I missed it). After some searching I find the command and it prompts about whether I want to use the source code or not (after a few reads I understood what was going on but it could be improved). Things started compiling and then I tried to run my package again, no luck. So then I try reinstalling and this time I noticed the error - something like "exited with non 0 status". Awesome. Looking a bit closer I noticed one of the dependencies was not installing. After trying to install the dependency manually I somehow realized it was only for R version > 3.6, I'm on 3.5. So I figured updating RStudio would fix the problem, no luck. It's not like RStudio advertises what version of R they are shipping with Rstudio .... Now I'm on someone's Linkedin post (wtf?) looking at how to upgrade R from within RStudio. They indicate that on my mac I should updateR (or wait, they say that turns out to be not good, so just install from CRAN). Hopefully that works. Do I try my luck with R v4? Nothing's going to break there right ...? This isn't meant to be a "R is bad" rant. Maybe C# or some other language really does avoid these problems, I don't know. However my experience has been the problems the author mentions are a problem everywhere. |
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The other issue is that many of us don't notice certain roadblocks because we're so used to working around them. In your case, my first instinct would be to `install.package(package_name)` and if something breaks, I google the error. Usually within 3-4 steps I'm on my way. But if something has just been released and no one's hit issues yet, google might not turn up anything. So then I'd have to open an issue on their github page and wait.
CRAN generally does a good job curating -- it has strict policies like if a package submission doesn't pass tests and doesn't succeed on automated builds on x number of platforms, it doesn't make it to the repo. That said, I've experienced a few package breakages before so I also want to validate your experience.
While I'm here, I also want to say as a Linux person, I hate the "compile first" culture of UNIX based software -- I'm not sure where it originated, probably GNU and open-source? Sometimes I just want to install a library and have it work -- just give me static binaries, don't make me compile stuff. I really don't care about the source code. To me as an end user, the appeal of open-source is that the source is available if I want it, but most of the time I really don't.
I get really frustrated when some Python packages don't offer wheels, and when the compilation breaks I have to spend hours/day figuring out what went wrong. TensorFlow 1 was particularly bad -- even with Bazel, things would break between releases. It's a huge productivity suck.