• Darren (unregistered)

    I've been coding on and off in a variety of languages for about 40 years. I've given myself a headache even trying to figure out the logic in that code. I can only assume that R was developed as one of those weird, oddball, novelty languages like Whitespace of BrainF*ck and someone didn't get the joke.

  • (nodebb)

    Remember: code is a liability and starts accruing cruft and tech-debt the instant it's released.

    This isn't true. It either is cruft and tech-debt right from the moment it's written, or it accumulates cruft and tech-debt as modifications (of code or of requirements) stomp through it in their big clompy boots later.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Darren

    Sadly, R looks like it's a pretty serious trhing (but not seriously pretty, as seen here). See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language).

    But the thing of using arrow (<-) for ordinary assignment wouldn't faze me at all, seeing as how I've worked with a programming language with the most self-referential name of any programming language that I've ever encountered. Um. A P(rogramming) L(anguage). That one uses a left-pointing arrow character for assignment.

  • Betsy (unregistered)

    Modern ILE RPG is a work of art compared to R. It's wild to think people actually program in R.

  • (nodebb)

    Indeed, arrow seems like the most logical assignment operator. Beginners often have problems with = because it doesn't express directionality. In math, it's a symmetric operation.

  • Gaetan (unregistered)

    Wait! This reminds me of the humorous tutorial «The R inferno»

    https://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf

    I do not know enough R to tell whether it is still relevant (it is from 2011), but I remember my R-savvy colleagues having a good laugh about it.

  • (nodebb)

    Hi, I'm this Carl. A couple quick notes. The R language has both NA and NULL, and they do different things. The original reason for the "<-" operator is that a trillion years ago there were keyboard with a key that generated a "<-" symbol, and in fact R was not the first language to use that key as an assignment op. Finally, if you really want to hurt your head, download and read "The R-Inferno," which is an excellent book showing many of the twisted things one can do (or do wrong) in R. www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/

  • (nodebb)

    Sorta smells like R is the modern version of "Matlab crashes into Excel". The quick and dirty tool for data analysis that every academic knows how to use badly. Just like back in the day every engineer used FORTRAN badly and a decade later every businessperson used Excel badly.

  • Kotarak (unregistered)

    To break a lance for R: It was made by non-programmers. Statisticians actually. So it is really weird. All the function names for trivial things are guaranteed to be Not What You Expect (tm). On the other hand it sports things like Fexprs (or something closely related). Hence, you can do all sorts of weird things resembling Lisp macros to a degree.

    The main use for R is - due to its background - statistics. You need some esoteric statistics thing? R has it. If it doesn't, it is either not statistics or not worth the time. I rather like R Shiny to create visualisations of data in various ways. It takes a lot of the heavy lifting.

    I even pushed it into an application service role, because that's what we had and I could sneak the application we needed in under the radar (using an S3 bucket as database with chacha20 encrypted (Don't ask. Bureaucracy), xz zipped files which contain one JSON map per line, each representing a version of the contents, newest first (a scheme devised by the late Peter Miller)).

    Should I have done that? No. Does it work? Perfectly.

    Just with any other language you have to take care of what you are doing and avoid to go to fancy for fancinesss sake. Rule one of Macro Club: Don't write macros.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Barry Margolin

    Indeed, arrow seems like the most logical assignment operator. Beginners often have problems with = because it doesn't express directionality. In math, it's a symmetric operation.

    And yet no mathematician would write "let 5 = x", ever. Nor "3x+5 = f(x)" when defining that function.

    Of course, that just means that in mathematics, "=" is used for several different things, and some of them very much are directional.

  • f222 (unregistered)

    One of the many thing I find horrible with R (visible with the is.na function call) is the tendency to use no snake_case, no camelCase but that weird dot.separated.case (does this even have a name). Don't think is is a class/object/namespace/... the name of the function is is.na and this is kind of standard in thant language...

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