University has started again, and many of you are taking courses in programming, artificial intelligence, statistics, accounting, or other fields that use the infamous R programming language. Hurrah! No, not hurrah. I hate R. If there were hate speech laws against computer languages, I would be in jail for what I really think about R. Of all the languages in the known universe, I can’t think of anything worse than R. I’d rather learn Klingon while in full Star Trek costume by reciting the days of the week backwards for hours on end.
Usage limitations
Now, why do I hate R more than JavaScript? Is it because Weird Al Yankovich sings about JavaScript? No. It’s because you can play with JavaScript, making fun little web games like Pong, PacMan, crosswords, Sudoku, or even Chess, or just simple quizzes. R can theoretically be used for fun things, but it’s not. It’s just used to process data.
You can’t have fun with R. You can, theoretically. But R is hard to learn not because it is complex, but because it is too simple to do anything interesting. R makes Excel and MySQL look like adventure parks. (Okay, nothing can make MySQL look fun, not even calling it MySqueel.)
Yes, I know you can make graphics with R, but they look like something you did in Microsoft Paint. And that is only for advanced users.
Checking limitations.
Python can be used in Blender, where you can easily see three 3 visuals. Javascript can be used in any consol or browser without adding any addition software.
And R? You have to download R, then download something like R studio. What is a feature of R studio? If your cursur is halfway down the page, it doesn’t compile the rest of the document. After hours of experimentation, you realise that the tutorial neglected to tell you that, and you put the cursur at the end of your document. Finally, you stop cursing when you find a tutorial in Portuguese that explains the “feature.”
There are all kinds of limitations in R Studio that just aren’t explained to beginners. Or if they are explained, it is so briefly that you think someone sneezed. It’s like hazing.
It doesn’t follow programming standards.
pet.peve <- “R”
(you can also say, pet_peve <- “R” but only if you’re using later editions. But both might not work.)
Okay, the one thing I do like is that it assumes new numbers are floating point rather than integers. Hurrah, it assumes numbers are floats. And it’s relatively easy to specify that something is an integer. But you don’t do this in a standard way.
What do I mean by standards? If you know Java, you can figure out most of JavaScript, Python, C++, and many other languages. If you learned Basic of Visual Basic, Object Oriented Languages do have a lot of new functionality, but they still look basically the same when it comes to simple coding. It’s like, Java is like Basic with C2 grammar or something. C++ is like an older dialect of Java. Python is like a pigeon of Java. JavaScript is another pigeon.
R is almost completely new. Sure, you have some of the old mathematical operators, but you assign things differently, you do a lot of things differently.
But doesn’t learning one programming language help you learn others? I mean, learning what a noun is in French helps you learn nouns in Korean, right? Well, R isn’t a language, it’s a code waiting to be deciphered. Even the grammar of R uses different terms. “Arrays” are called “Vectors.” Maybe next year I’ll learn the difference between arrays and vectors, but for now, if you wonder what vectors are, they are basically arrays.
It’s hard to find tutorials in most human languages
You can find Python tutorials in Romanian, and Java. R, well, there’s English, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese, and that’s about it. Most of the tutorials in English have the microphone turned down to almost zero, and the guy seems to be whispering because he’s ashamed to be using R. So, the main use of R is to practice your Korean, Chinese or (Brazilian) Portuguese.
It’s soft propaganda for AI
R is so boring, and frustrating, that it makes you want to outsource your programming to AI.
For instance, if you put an extra space in the wrong place, or put a space on one side of an operator and not the other, R refuses to work properly. If you put the cursur in the wrong place in your document, R studio doesn’t think you want to read the rest of the document.
If you enjoy programming in R, I give you a happiness award. You can be happy doing anything.
Best R tutorials
Okay, so after all that, I found one set of tutorials that are clear and easy to follow. Here is where we learn about “vectors.”
“This vector looks a little weird because the one two and three are quoted, which means they were stored as characters.” I thought it looked weird because it said that ‘R’ ‘is’ ‘Fun!’ But yeah, DataDaft makes R clear at least, so if you lose your notes from class, I would definitely check DataDaft’s tutorials. It took me a few quiet tutorials to find him. He speaks at full volume, and knows what he’s talking about.
If you speak Portuguese, I also found some good Brazilian tutorials on Udemy. And, yes, I found my notes, and they explains most things (but no one told me why arrays are called vectors. And I still haven’t found out why 90 percent of the variable names I try don’t work.)