alt Hacker NewsPeople would typically choose based on CRAN TaskViews or follow conventional methodologies, but what I notice from this is that R is truly a language used only by those who use it. And the people who use it are usually master's students or professors; it's rarely used at the undergraduate level. So even those with that level of academic background and training must have had their own implementation roadblocks. Could that be why the use of R has exploded with the help of AI? Looking at this, I think it's fair to understand that even domain experts found programming difficult. Seeing this, can we really say that AI is always bad? For some people, it has become both the hands and a voice for their words.
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There is some great stuff in R but from a software engineering level I'd much rather data scientists work in Python.
At risk of sounding like ChatGPT, it's not an R thing, it's a general thing. Turn [showdead] on in your profile and see how Show HN is flooded with AI slop projects and we all know GitHub is drowning in it.
A considerable amount of work for grad students is answering the question: "How the f#$% do I get this code to compile and run"
Some other researcher, often with limited skills in your native tongue, even more limited skills in software development best practices, wrote some code for a paper between 5 and 50 years ago and your PI has told you to use that code and some OTHER code together at the same time to validate some experiment he wants you to do.
In the past you would take days/weeks/months to get this to work, but with an LLM?
I'm envious of the grad students of today for the amount of nonsense which is bypassable.
Programming is a lot easier than statistics bc it’s deterministic, whereas statistics is stochastic (that extends and encompasses deterministic functions).
AI speeds up learning, so I bet that’s what you’re noticing with R.
As an aside, the best programmers these days are probabilistic programmers (who write stochastic functions). Our languages are Stan and PyMC. Both can be called by Python or R, and AI writes all of them extremely well. So it seems to me that the underlying language matters less than ever.
> Seeing this, can we really say that AI is always bad?
Is anyone arguing “AI is always bad”? I think the argument is clearly “the negatives outweigh the positives”.