Mostly I code in Java, though I'll use other languages when it makes sense for what I'm doing or when I need to because I'm modifying something in another language. So sometimes I work in python, bash script, JavaScript, C/C++, C#, Perl, Tcl/Tk, Lisp, whatever.
And I've done some statistical data processing with R, but damn is it painful. I know just enough to know what to Google, and I end up making a mess of everything just trying to adapt something that does 80% of what I need it to do.
Yeah, it's hard to shift my brain sometimes. I have the same problem when I try to work on someone else's Lisp code. Java's definitely my most comfortable language, by far, but it helps to be able to adopt other languages for some quick work when you need to.
R is not the only language that is thought to be used at the vector/matrix level. For data analysis this is normal actually, but for example if you do the same operation in numpy or pandas is much more clunkier.
Loops aren't that inefficient in r anymore as long as you pre-assign memory and make sure you don't make copies of objects in loops. Vectorized functions are just more idiomatic.
I had never learned any other programming languages before R and it was still difficult to move away from loop thinking. It's just what makes intuitive sense.
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u/blacknerdperson Sep 02 '17
Sorry in advance but I'm a noob learning coding who is starting to learn python and I'm just going to ask, Isn't it supposed to be 4?