[horsawlarway]

Coming from Matlab, I have the opposite feeling.

I truly, genuinely dislike the language. I think it's very productive, and I appreciate that Matlab costs an arm and a leg (and god help you once you start paying for some of the nicer packages on top) - but Matlab has spoiled me immensely on the language front.

To me, Matlab feels like a language that was designed with an intent to appeal to folks with some understanding of traditional procedural programming, but nudged into treating matrices as first class citizens.

R feels like a language that was built for people who were using excel, and have never written a line of code in their life - it's riddled with completely unintuitive, frustrating, intentionally obtuse operators and terms for things that have perfectly fine definitions in normal programming.

The difference is that I have 20+ years of programming experience (including quite a bit of functional programming) that I can easily port over to Matlab, and which becomes literal baggage trying to use R. The end result is that I will use R, but I basically always walk away frustrated and infuriated, even when the problem is solved.

[jghn]

> R feels like a language that was built for people who were using excel

The S language predates the first release of Excel by 11 years.

> and which becomes literal baggage trying to use R

I've had the opposite experience. My experience was that having a broad array of programming experience made it easier to pick up the weirder corners of R. It became more likely that I'd seen *something* similar to that construct in the past. The converse has also been true. Seeing all the weird corners in R has made it easier to pick up new concepts in other languages & paradigms as it's been more likely I've seen *something* similar from R.

[dm319]

Using pipes and tidyverse/data.table allows for great things in R, and has a strong functional feel. It can be quite beautiful reshaping data, splitting, map, recombining and plotting it.

It doesn't go well at all with a procedural method.

[ekianjo]

> R feels like a language that was built for people who were using excel,

I don't think so. Most people who come to R after years of Excel find it just as alien as you do.

[jghn]

I recall when the pipe operator was first being proposed the argument for it was that it'd enable workflows that felt more like Excel. The implication being that indeed, base R is alien to an Excel user.

I also recall my pushback was along the lines of "who on earth would want that". Yeah, it's a good thing I'm not the person coming up with these things :)

[klmr]

> I recall when the pipe operator was first being proposed the argument for it was that it'd enable workflows that felt more like Excel.

Where are you getting that from? To start with the pipe operator has been independently reinvented multiple times in R, and neither ‘magrittr’ nor ‘dplyr’ were the first to introduce the pipe operator into R. And (at least when I was exposed to it), the pipe operator had nothing whatsoever to do with Excel. Instead, it was an attempt to introduce the composability concepts from the UNIX shell and Haskell composition into R.

[jghn]

You have me second guessing myself, that perhaps I’m conflating it with the convo around dplyr in it’s early days

EDIT: I found the conversation in question but it involved deleted tweets. And those deleted tweets are the one that reference the package name. Sigh. It was just after the release of magrittr and several months after dplyr

[ekianjo]

> I recall when the pipe operator was first being proposed the argument for it was that it'd enable workflows that felt more like Excel.

I have no idea where you get that impression, most Excel power users I have met take a long time to understand how to use the pipe operator in R.

[LosWochosWeek]

How do you feel about the pipe operator these days?

[jghn]

I haven't used R enough in the last 10 years to have an R-specific opinion. And to be honest it was more an unlearned statement on my part as it was an "ew, Excel" response and not thinking about the underlying workflow.

In the intervening time I've become a large advocate for the pattern of chained operators. So I'd imagine I'd enjoy piping in R. And if that means I'm emulating a common Excel workflow, that's fine. I won't have the childish response of "ew, Excel" :)