<story><title>Complexity is a source of income in open source ecosystems (2019)</title><url>https://www.r-bloggers.com/2019/07/complexity-is-a-source-of-income-in-open-source-ecosystems/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwawayboise</author><text>The popularity of R amazes me. I took a one-week class in R and left with a vow to avoid it at all costs. I have never seen a more confusing, hard to understand, inconsistent software product in my 30 years as an IT professional. It&amp;#x27;s apparently targeted at scientists and sociologists who are non-programmers. I have no idea how they manage to use it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colechristensen</author><text>Scientific programming is just different.  Much of the culture of scientific programming is different and with good reasons not easy to understand.&lt;p&gt;Its something like how baking cookies at home and running a cookie factory are very different.  To a person doing each, the behaviors and priorities of the other seem strange and it’s easy to for one to think “we are both just making cookies, why don’t they do what i do which is obviously superior “&lt;p&gt;Scientific programmers are solving problems first, not writing programs. They are solving problems in a way that is useful only to them or peers who know a whole lot about the problem being solved.  The problem-first tools look strange because they deemphasize the programming niceness in favor of problem niceness.&lt;p&gt;You find the same sort of confusion when programmers are facing business types and excel usage.&lt;p&gt;There are certainly times when a piece of code starts needing the programming touch, but the right tool for the job depends on the job.</text></comment>
<story><title>Complexity is a source of income in open source ecosystems (2019)</title><url>https://www.r-bloggers.com/2019/07/complexity-is-a-source-of-income-in-open-source-ecosystems/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwawayboise</author><text>The popularity of R amazes me. I took a one-week class in R and left with a vow to avoid it at all costs. I have never seen a more confusing, hard to understand, inconsistent software product in my 30 years as an IT professional. It&amp;#x27;s apparently targeted at scientists and sociologists who are non-programmers. I have no idea how they manage to use it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blacktriangle</author><text>My description of R: It makes hard things easy and easy things hard. Ergonomically it is the absolute worst &amp;quot;programming language&amp;quot; I&amp;#x27;ve touched in my life. However somehow it managed to become the official language of statistics research and has packages to do any type of analysis you can dream of.&lt;p&gt;I think the reason you and I dislike R is because we just work differently than non-programmers. Non programmers think in purely imperative, straight-forward semantics. They write one-off unmaintainable code tying together libraries that solves their immediate problem. Programmers try and write R code as if it was a proper programming language and immediately run into walls. Non-programmers never see the walls because they don&amp;#x27;t even know there&amp;#x27;s another way.</text></comment>