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by s_suiindik 48 days ago
This isn't really about R vs Python, it's about grammar matching the shape of the problem.

tidyverse + SQL + Terraform + dbt all have the same trick: the verbs literally ARE the operations, so reading the code IS reading the intent. Pandas, Ansible playbooks, hand-rolled ETL.. they all make you reconstruct intent from control flow. That works fine when writing is the bottleneck. It doesn't once review becomes the bottleneck.

Which is basically the AI era. Writing is free, reviewing isn't. Whichever grammar the reviewer can skim fastest wins the project regardless of what the model prefers to generate.

Kinda ironic given LLMs are way better at pandas than dplyr (training data). So now you've got this weird tension where the model wants Python and the reviewer wants R.

1 comments

You're absolutely right! It goes a way beyond 'R vs. Python', I used it to illustrate the good readability of tidyverse.

I don't think most of people haven't realized this readability importance unless you're used to the tidyverse.