alt Hacker NewsI couldn’t disagree more. The base packages are a complete mess. If R was subset to only the tidyverse 5 years ago then it wouldn’t have lost so much ground to Python in nearly all fields.
Posit is obviously the only organization with the pull to do that, and I feel like they got pulled in 10 directions during the move to AI and trying to also support Python. R Shiny is dead too which sucks because reflex.dev just copied them and ate their lunch in 3 months.
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PaulHoule • today at 1:37 PM
Python is just such a good Swiss army knife and it's never a waste to learn: you can do data science and you can do almost anything else. It's the BASIC of the 21st century.
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The proof is in the pudding. Every single grad student of mine that was brought up on the tidyverse produces gigantic R markdown files with 20 imports to accomplish something that would be shorter and much much easier to understand (and review!) with a base package or with one of a small number of packages (box, data.table) designed by people who understand programming.
Not to mention the ridiculous styling/formatting of most tidyverse users, which Wickham and others seem to promote. One of the reasons R has lost ground to other languages recently is that most R code these days is ugly