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by disgruntledphd2 710 days ago
> While I only know R, which is obviously a simple language

Take it from someone who started with R, R is 100% not a simple language. If you can write good R, you're probably a surprisingly good potential SE as R is kinda insane and inconsistent due to 50+ years of history (from S, to R etc).
1 comments
jakderrida 710 days ago
Hmmm.. I'm trying to imagine interviewing for SE and telling them I got wealthy from a crypto market-making algorithm I coded in R during Covid and the interviewer responding with anything but laughter or with silence as they ponder legal ways to question my mental health.

It's an excellent language, I think, for many reasons. One is that you can work with data within hours because even before learning what packages or classes are, you got native objects for data storage, wrangling, and analysis. Even import my Excel data and rapidly learn the native function cheat sheet so fast that I was excited to learn what packages are because I couldn't wait to see what I could do.

That was my experience in like 2010, maybe, and after having C++ and Python go in and out my head during college multiple times. I view R as simple only because I actually felt more helpless to keep learning it than helpless to ever learn coding at all. Worth noting that I was a Stat/Probability tutor with a Finance degree and much Excel experience.

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disgruntledphd2 710 days ago
> That was my experience in like 2010, maybe, and after having C++ and Python go in and out my head during college multiple times. I view R as simple only because I actually felt more helpless to keep learning it than helpless to ever learn coding at all. Worth noting that I was a Stat/Probability tutor with a Finance degree and much Excel experience.

Ah yeah, makes sense. That's the happy path for learning R (know enough stats etc to decode the help pages).

That being said, R is an interesting language with lots of similarities to both C based languages and also Lisp (R was originally a scheme intepreter), so it's surprisingly good at lots of things (except string manipulation, it's terrible at that).

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