Data Science Retreat, Day 2 – Intimately R

– Today was R day! 🙂

I’ve been using R since 2008, and I’ve learnt a lot today. My favourite was that

"<-"(x,1)

works the same way as

x<-1

That seems minor, but it is very neat, es. when writing more complex calls. I knew that basically everything relies on functions in R, but somehow I had never thought about what this means for “<-“, “[” etc.

– Also, R is the language for lazy programmers: There are many in-built functions that work like loops. Mostly there’s no need to rely heavily on if/for/while loops. That explains why I usually feel like cheating when saying I’d be quite ok in R “programming”: the language does a lot for you. So, for me, using R was always more about stitching together existing functions and finding the right packages than about fancy programming.

– I still feel a little weird because of that

but that’s going to pass, probably. We will see.

– Oh, and I saw Sascha Lobo this morning on my way to Zalando.

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