This blog by Gordon Shotwell has passed my Twitter feed a couple of times now and I thought I’d share it here: blog.shotwell.ca/posts/why_i_use_r

It in, Gordon present his reasons for using R, describing R’s four unique selling point, and outlining a discussion full of perfectly quotable thoughts and opinions.

Do have a look at the original blog as well, but here’s my 3-minute summary:

Gordon finds that there are four main features of the R programming language that are essential to his work and in a sense unique to the R language. Here they are, along with quotes by Gordon explaining R’s unique selling points in his words:

(1) Native data science structures

It’s relatively easy to do data science in R without any external libraries. You can read data from a csv into a data frame, plot and clean that data, and analyse it using built-in statistical models.

(2) Non-standard evaluation

Non-standard evaluation lets you do things like use a variable name in a plot title, or evaluate a user-supplied expression in a different environment.

[…]

For example, R lets you specify models with a formula interface like this: lm(mtcars, mpg ~ cyl). This is a natural way for statisticians to specify statistical models because they’re usually familliar with the syntax, but without NSE there’s no way to make that function work as written because mpg and cylare not objects in the calling environment. 

(3) Packaging concensus

R let me get up and running, installing packages, filtering data, and printing plots in under 20 minutes, which meant that I stayed interested in the language and eventually started using it professionally. I had actually started to learn Python at around the same time but just found it too difficult. 
[…]

The user that I care the most about only has 20 minutes of attention and no real programming skill, so the only thing they can “just” do is copy and paste one line of code into a console. If that doesn’t work, I’ve lost them, and they’ll spend another lonely year renewing their SPSS licenses.

(4) Functional programming

I really like this pattern of [functional] programming because breaking complicated jobs down into small functional bricks gives me confidence that the overall solution is correct. I can work on the small functions, verify that they’re correct through tests, and then know that combining those building blocks together won’t change their behaviour.

Although I personally do not fully agree with these four points (e.g., I very much like to leverage functional programming in Python and it works like a charm!) I very much liked the outline Gordon provides. I’d love to hear your thoughts as well, so do share them in the comments.

For now, let’s end with some other lovely quotes by Gordon:

The thing is, I don’t use R out of some blind brand loyalty but because I don’t like working hard. 

I came to R from an Excel background, and for a long time I had internalized the feeling that serious engineers used Python, while analysts or researchers could use languages like R. Over time I’ve realized that the people making that statement often aren’t really informed. They rarely know anything about R, and often don’t really write production-quality code themselves.

In contrast, most of the very senior engineers I’ve met understand that all programming languages are basically just bundles of trade-offs, and so no single language is going to be globally superior to another. There really are no production languages – only production engineers.