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This is silly. I bet your colleagues are making poor R programs because they are not well versed in programming, not because R is inheritanly worse than anythin

by whyhow 7y ago

This is silly. I bet your colleagues are making poor R programs because they are not well versed in programming, not because R is inheritanly worse than anything else. My experience is that people who make bad R programs also make bad python programs. I don't think you should blame a tool for issues caused by the programmer.

glofish 7y ago
try loading up any scientific package and you'll see how, in turn loads up other and other packages, in bioinformatics you can easily add up to dozens if not a hundred of dependencies, each written in R by people with questionable skills. there is no escape. When I said "colleagues" I really meant the entire scientific field runs on untold lines of buggy R code, so obtuse, so cryptic, that the task of debugging or even tracing what is going on is practically impossible. And you can't debug it because it is this awful R code everywhere! And when the code breaks it does not break like normal programming language do, with an error or exception or even a stack dump. No! Most of the time your R code will just start silently doing the wrong thing.
- proverbialbunny 7y ago
  glofish, do you like functional programming paradigm languages like Lisp and Haskell? It's entirely possible that R is weird and unconventional giving a negative impression, due to it being FPP. >try loading up any scientific package and you'll see how, in turn loads up other and other packages, in bioinformatics you can easily add up to dozens if not a hundred of dependencies That's not necessarily a bad thing unless you're trying to run R on embedded or some other constrained environment. >When I said "colleagues" I really meant the entire scientific field runs on untold lines of buggy R code, so obtuse, so cryptic I can't recall the last time I've bumped into a bug in an R library. I'm sure they exist but thankfully the ecosystem is quite stable. >that the task of debugging or even tracing what is going on is practically impossible. Debugging in R is easier than most languages. I'm unsure where you're getting your facts from. >And when the code breaks it does not break like normal programming language do, with an error or exception or even a stack dump. No! Most of the time your R code will just start silently doing the wrong thing. It's no worse than Python in this regard. R isn't particularly bad in this area, but it's certainly no C++. I'm going back to guessing it's because R is FPP. That's R's dirtiest and most offensive part to the uninitiated.

by whyhow 7y ago

glofish 7y ago

try loading up any scientific package and you'll see how, in turn loads up other and other packages, in bioinformatics you can easily add up to dozens if not a hundred of dependencies, each written in R by people with questionable skills. there is no escape. When I said "colleagues" I really meant the entire scientific field runs on untold lines of buggy R code, so obtuse, so cryptic, that the task of debugging or even tracing what is going on is practically impossible. And you can't debug it because it is this awful R code everywhere! And when the code breaks it does not break like normal programming language do, with an error or exception or even a stack dump. No! Most of the time your R code will just start silently doing the wrong thing.

proverbialbunny 7y ago
glofish, do you like functional programming paradigm languages like Lisp and Haskell? It's entirely possible that R is weird and unconventional giving a negative impression, due to it being FPP. >try loading up any scientific package and you'll see how, in turn loads up other and other packages, in bioinformatics you can easily add up to dozens if not a hundred of dependencies That's not necessarily a bad thing unless you're trying to run R on embedded or some other constrained environment. >When I said "colleagues" I really meant the entire scientific field runs on untold lines of buggy R code, so obtuse, so cryptic I can't recall the last time I've bumped into a bug in an R library. I'm sure they exist but thankfully the ecosystem is quite stable. >that the task of debugging or even tracing what is going on is practically impossible. Debugging in R is easier than most languages. I'm unsure where you're getting your facts from. >And when the code breaks it does not break like normal programming language do, with an error or exception or even a stack dump. No! Most of the time your R code will just start silently doing the wrong thing. It's no worse than Python in this regard. R isn't particularly bad in this area, but it's certainly no C++. I'm going back to guessing it's because R is FPP. That's R's dirtiest and most offensive part to the uninitiated.