> how use of R is more complex when you’re largely ignorant of the tidyverse
This.
I'm interested in non-flamewar non-religious reasons that the tidyverse is bad. He does give some. I think his complaints about inconsistency and a moving target have some validity. However, the price of not using tidyverse is (roughly) paid in the rest of the article. I would definitely not use R without it.
Read his Section 5 on the tidyverse... and see how absolutely minimal his complaints in that section are. E.g. to "purrr" his objections are "largely philosophical"... but he's complaining in the previous section about the annoyance of writing lambdas (which purrr makes even easier).
Yes, R has a big community and there's a lot of quirks in individual packages, especially less-used ones. Yes, there are packages presenting unified interfaces to other quirky outputs (e.g., broom). The necessity of this is not good. The existence of it is good.
HN readers - do you have an "up and coming" language that you think has better structured the fundamentals from R, that you hope will someday have enough capabilities you can use it instead of R? I've tried Julia, which is beautiful but the startup/compilation times were difficult to get over. Is it reasonable to hope Julia will be good for interactive usage someday? Is it already? Are there other candidates in this area?
> Yes, R has a big community and there's a lot of quirks in individual packages, especially less-used ones
Most of his examples of WTF's are from base-R. And he's definitely not wrong, as many of these have bitten me a bunch over the years.
> I'm interested in non-flamewar non-religious reasons that the tidyverse is bad.
For the very reason that it's great to use, it's a nightmare to develop with. NSE is super handy as a user, but it's an absolute nightmare to build new functions on top of (dplyr specifically). Like, I now know 2-3 different ways in which quoting/substituting etc can be done for the tidyverse, and I've had to maintain code using them a bunch of times.
It's incredibly annoying, and every time I do it I need to look up Hadley's new approach to NSE (don't get me wrong, I adore using the tidyverse, but I absolutely despise programming with it).
> HN readers - do you have an "up and coming" language that you think has better structured the fundamentals from R, that you hope will someday have enough capabilities you can use it instead of R?
Hope is the operative word here!
I'm writing a language to compete in this area. It's called Mech and I'll be releasing the first beta in October. You can think of it like Matlab + Excel. It's very fast, has default-parallel semantics for operators and functions like Matlab, reactive dataflow like Excel, and supports full interactive coding with no startup/compilation latency issues. It's meant for robots, but I've also designed it to be a better Matlab, and I think it should take on R handily. Fair warning, it's public alpha now so error messages are sparse and the happy path is narrow.
Worst part of the tidyverse is learning it, and then looking up how to use specific functions. The bad documentation is mostly in the ggplot lib though.
The “bad” ggplot documentation is mostly a function of one’s own understanding of the grammar of graphics. That’s what the “gg” in ggplot stands for.
If you don’t understand the GG, then ggplot will seem opaque, and no goodness of documentation will suffice.
I don’t mean to blame the user. Perhaps the ggplot documentation could improve by reinforcing the need to understand that or referencing it more frequently?
This.
I'm interested in non-flamewar non-religious reasons that the tidyverse is bad. He does give some. I think his complaints about inconsistency and a moving target have some validity. However, the price of not using tidyverse is (roughly) paid in the rest of the article. I would definitely not use R without it.
Read his Section 5 on the tidyverse... and see how absolutely minimal his complaints in that section are. E.g. to "purrr" his objections are "largely philosophical"... but he's complaining in the previous section about the annoyance of writing lambdas (which purrr makes even easier).
Yes, R has a big community and there's a lot of quirks in individual packages, especially less-used ones. Yes, there are packages presenting unified interfaces to other quirky outputs (e.g., broom). The necessity of this is not good. The existence of it is good.
HN readers - do you have an "up and coming" language that you think has better structured the fundamentals from R, that you hope will someday have enough capabilities you can use it instead of R? I've tried Julia, which is beautiful but the startup/compilation times were difficult to get over. Is it reasonable to hope Julia will be good for interactive usage someday? Is it already? Are there other candidates in this area?