Go R, Young Man 144
theodp (442580) writes " Learning to code has become a mainstream fascination," writes Brian Liou in Why are YOU learning to code?, "but all the evangelization has been misleading. The problem in our Chris-Bosh-codes-so-should-you society is that people learn to code without first asking "for what purpose do you want to use code?" What in your day-to-day work could you actually automate using code? Let's face it, your odds of creating the next hot iPhone app aren't great, but the spreadsheets you look at everyday or the strategic business decisions you or your company makes? Coding can help you with those. Coding to better understand data would help everyone." Leada co-founder Liou's advice? "So to all non-technical professionals looking to get technical: If you want to become a software engineer, by all means learn Ruby or go through the JavaScript tutorials on Codecademy. But if you're simply a business professional looking to gain an edge on your peers, trust me, you are much better off learning R." So, did Mark Zuckerberg steer 100 million K-12 coder wannabes down the wrong path with the JavaScript and Ruby preaching?"
Just learn to program (Score:4, Insightful)
Language is not relevant, as long as you don't just learn one.
Re:Just learn to program (Score:5, Insightful)
1) You have to choose a programming language to learn with. You don't learn to program in a vacuum.
2) A non-technical person doesn't want to learn tons of programming languages especially when they have no relevance to their business. Hence the suggestion of the article writer that they focus on something like R over Ruby/Javascript since it's likely to have more relevance to them.
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What does 'you don't learn to program in a vacuum' have to do with the statement 'you have to choose a programming language to learn with'?
I learned QBASIC, then C, then Java, then Python, and only by the fourth stage did I consider that I'd learned anything close to 'how to program'. Had I started with R I'd probably be 10 steps behind where I am now.
OTOH I do believe R is a lot more practical than many languages people use and it does seem to be doable by those who cannot otherwise program. So the artic
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My point is that learning one language will NOT teach you to program.
But for a person who isn't a programming by career it teaches you more than enough.
And don't tell me the article is for 'non-technical people', not me, because I was non-technical prior to learning a bunch of programming languages. 'Non-technical' is a choice, not genetic :P
The article is for non-technical people. The quotes from the article writer explicitly say that. Also, it's great that you spent all that time learning a bunch of languages. The average person doesn't have that much time to invest if it isn't their career.
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"The average person doesn't have that much time to invest if it isn't their career."
I want to agree with you, I really do. But I see this as the biggest problem with our society today.
Coding skills should be a mandatory part of public education.
We don't complain that people don't know how to average a set of numbers, or determine the unit price at the grocery store, then say 'well average people don't have time to learn that stuff' but we try our absolute best to teach EVERYONE such basic skills.
Programming should NOT be any different.
What on earth is a non programmer going to do with that? You're comparing a highly specialized skill that takes years to learn compared to a basic instinctive skill that takes an hour at most. You shouldn't be comparing it to averaging numbers, you should be comparing it to forging. Everyone should learn how to craft a pan from iron! That's not quite an equal, as it actually would help most, but it's close enough. What should be taught is logic - that would actually help people to think systematically. Prog
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Basic coding skills does *not* take years to learn
My son is in 4th grade. His class learned programming using Scratch [mit.edu]. Within a few weeks, nearly all of the kids were able to write programs to solve specific problems.
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Everything has to start somewhere. While learning CPR doesn't make you a doctor it does give you a basic life saving skill. Learning to code in something like Scratch doesn't make you a professional programmer but it does give you a set of tools to solve certain problems with. From there it's a matter of expanding your knowledge and developing skills.
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3 months after the class has ended, go back and see how many of them can still use it to solve basic problems. I'm betting more than half of them won't even remember how to do basic conditionals.
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3 months after the class has ended, go back and see how many of them can still use it to solve basic problems. I'm betting more than half of them won't even remember how to do basic conditionals.
Half may not remember, but the other half will. Even those that forgot, will still have a basic understanding of what programming is, and what programmers can accomplish. Most people learn algebra in school, but far less than half can solve a quadratic equation years later.
Re: Just learn to program (Score:3)
A little programming can be a very useful thing.
I'm an accountant and a Finance Director (CFO in US terminology). I don't code for a living, but I know a little R. That gives me a huge advantage: if I want to understand our sales stats or movements in yields, I can analyse the numbers myself. Normally, I have the luxury of asking someone in the team to do the job, but, sometimes when the question is ill-defined and open-ended, it's much more effective and efficient to go straight to the answer myself. Somet
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A little programming can be a very useful thing.
I'm an accountant and a Finance Director (CFO in US terminology). I don't code for a living, but I know a little R. That gives me a huge advantage: if I want to understand our sales stats or movements in yields, I can analyse the numbers myself. Normally, I have the luxury of asking someone in the team to do the job, but, sometimes when the question is ill-defined and open-ended, it's much more effective and efficient to go straight to the answer myself. Sometimes, if I'm brought some analysis that's 90% of what I need, it's easier and more efficient to complete it myself.
Don't invent specious analogies about casting iron pots because you lack the imagination to see how tools could be used more widely.
Perhaps I'm ignorant of how exactly accounting works (in which case, feel free to tell me, I do not work in finance for a living), but if you're using R like that, it's essentially a glorified graphical calculator, no? I dispute labeling that as general purpose programming. And even if we assume it is, accounting is something I doubt is anywhere close to the most common job. I'd say something like a janitor or waiter is, and how is knowing how to program going to help there?
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R as I use it is essentially a glorified calculator, but it's definitely not a graphical one - although it can produce very high quality graphic.
I'm not sure what you mean 'general purpose programming'; in fact, I'm sceptical that any such concept has any meaning. If you're asking if I'm structuring a large code base, I'm certainly not doing that: I rarely get beyond 100 lines of code, and, due to the nature of R, I can't even recall the precise syntax of a For loop (there's a saying that if you think you n
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Learning how to "program" for many of us on this website means something entirely different for "programming" to non-technical people. I would wager that most non-technical people want to issue a series of fixed instructions to perform a series of actions and are looking for the big lever. They're not looking to write beautiful, well crafted code, that is efficient, maintainable and extensible.
Learning a language to someone like this very much IS learning to program, to the extent they care. And it's good t
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I do believe R is a lot more practical than many languages people use and it does seem to be doable by those who cannot otherwise program. So the article probably has a point. If you want to get better at math and leverage computers for decision making, but can't be arsed to really get into how computers work, R is probably a good thing to check out. But if you like the ideas and capabilities it opens up - FFS, learn more languages.
Why FFS should someone who only needs to analyse the performance of their business need to learn more languages after learning and applying their newly acquired R knowledge and skills? For many people writing code is not their passion much less their raison d-etre. If you had learned the R language, its libraries (packages) and the many presentation tools available, then maybe you would not have gone all religious on us.
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There is the complex issue of your first languages shaping your view on later languages, at least for the extremely common approach of not taking the time to fully grasp the later languages/programming models.
Personally, though, I think 99% of people who don't want to be coders should only write bother with programming if their field of interest is likely to require it. I know so many full time programmers who are shitty at it, I don't understand the delusion that people who dabble in it are going
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There is the complex issue of your first languages shaping your view on later languages, at least for the extremely common approach of not taking the time to fully grasp the later languages/programming models.
Except the audience of this article isn't to people who will be learning a bunch of languages to become a programmer. It's for the non-technical business person who wants to learn a language that will help them in their job.
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For those people, I give Excel...
My biggest fear is we're fostering the next generation of crap coders who leave behind a legacy of badly written crapola. My first professional work as a programmer was cleaning up VisualBASIC 4 code, and then a decade later, I was given the job of cleaning up PHP4 code, and the experiences were equally awful.
Re:Just learn to program (Score:5, Funny)
Really? Mine's clowns.
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A lot of us older guys learned to code on first and second generation microcomputers, generally running BASIC variants. I suppose I learned plenty of bad habits in those old days, and the bit of 680x 8-bit assembly I dabbled in definitely did not help. But I remember the first proper computer science class I took in high school, and was introduced to TurboPascal. It was literally like I was basked in heavenly light and the harps, strings and voices of the Choir Eternal rained down upon me. I'm in my mid-40s
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Hence the suggestion of the article writer that they focus on something like R over Ruby/Javascript since it's likely to have more relevance to them.
For this particular application, Python (combined with the scipy stack) would be pretty much just as good, and as easy (if not easier) to learn, but is otherwise a much more versatile and general-purpose tool.
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True. Though some languages are more "beginner friendly" than others.
Though I could be convinced to agree that some languages cripple the mind irreparably, like Python.
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Re:Just learn to program (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people don't have the time to sink into learning multiple programming languages. Especially when programming isn't their career.
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In that case, R wouldn't help them either. You really need to understand how you're solving the problem before you throw some R at it and suddenly get an answer.
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Language is not relevant? All languages are not created equal. They have very specific strengths and weaknesses related to the design of the language.
I don't know why people always talk about programming languages in a vacuum: "I personally like x language, so I think people should learn it". Instead, it should be: "What are you interested in DOING with the language?" Just learning how programming works? Want to make web apps? Program an app for your iPhone? Create a computer game? Analyze and visua
Re: Just learn to program (Score:3)
Well, compared to Matlab or Mathematica, yes. Or compared to commercial products like Visual Studio. Or the hardware cost sink of having to buy a Mac to get the free Xcode to program for the iPhone/iPad/iPod....
Not everything is gcc or clang on a free *nix
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Visual Studio has had free editions for many years now.
Nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, CEO of Erlang Solutions [erlang-solutions.com] thinks Erlang is great. No word on why.......
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CEO of data analysis company suggests people learn data analysis language.
Because data analysis is a large part of many businesses and many that don't do extensive data analysis probably should be. So there isn't really anything that extraordinary or silly in his recommendation.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if he had a well reasoned argument to support his choice, I would be really interested in reading it, but I can't find it among the maze of links in the summary. Incidentally, his company offers courses in R, so if you've recently decided you want to learn it because the co-founder of a startup recommended it, there's a convenient place you can go to learn it.
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May I ask what you chose or would choose? (Genuine question, btw.)
TBH I would spend my time on something other than learning to program. Go through some Zig Ziglar training or something.
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Except that this doesn't mean regular people should be learning R. Rather, the business should hire somebody's who already has a background in data analysis/statistics, and probably also already a knowledge of R (or at least can pick it up quicker).
Re: Nothing to see here (Score:2)
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that learning Visual Basic and 'programming' in Excel will actually give you an edge on your business professional peers.
Last time I checked, Excel was the hammer of choice for most businesses (maybe combined with SPSS), not R (I'm not sure if any business even uses it).
Ironically, if you focus on Google Spreadsheets, learning Javascript (and the Google APIs) is what is required if you want to do more advanced stuff.
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure that learning Visual Basic and 'programming' in Excel will actually give you an edge on your business professional peers.
I did (learn VBA) and did (use it to program in Excel) and it did (give me an edge over my peers).
Now I am dipping my toes in C++ for a specific project (game using Unreal Engine).
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That's exactly what I did. People have been using my scripts for years and come to me for enhancements.
While nobody's really indispensable, it's always good to be hard to replace :)
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Last time I checked, Excel was the hammer of choice for most businesses (maybe combined with SPSS), not R (I'm not sure if any business even uses it).
Now that Microsoft has acquired Revolution Analytics, who's to say it's not going to be Excel and R? Those two have some pretty natural integration points.
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The problem is... (Score:1)
The normal problem is that the majority working with spreadsheets as the summary suggests never do enough of it to get good or understand what's bad.
I remember Y2K and being handed a ruck load of foxbase code a team had written to make work for Y2K, since it was now ITs problem to sort it all out. The easiest thing to do with much of it was scrap it and rewrite it to do what they actually thought it did rather than what was coded.
Learn math and probability theory (Score:1)
If you don't know what you're doing fancy tools will just get you in trouble.
As for R, well your mileage may vary. I bought slew of books and spent some time with it. Unfortunately using procedures that were not ready for prime time. So I went back to using other tools that were reliable and actually provided some information about what was wrong if it didn't work. Of course, I can code in several languages and have forgotten a few others (e.g lex & yacc).
R is fine if you're in love with statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
R is very good at manipulating and plotting data but the charts produced aren't always of the highest quality. They're fine for internal use. There are lots of packages to extend the usefulness of the language but at its heart and soul it's about numbers and plots. It's not really a general purpose language. Just keep that in mind.
Re:R is fine if you're in love with statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly.
For the average person working at a medium-to-large company (or even small ones, really), VBA (or whatever scripting language your office suite uses) will be much more valuable than R.
Back when I still cared about such things, you also could do wrong with stuff like Crystal Reports and learning to actually use MS Access. The PHB doesn't understand code or programming - they don't mean anything to him - but if you can hand him the data that he wants in a beautiful format and make his spreadsheet jump through flaming hoops, he'll be impressed.
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Derp. Never do wrong, not also could do wrong. Shouldn't post to slashdot before coffee.
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That's certainly very true, except for the "good luck doing this in VBA" thing. VBA is turing complete. It might not produce dozens of plots in a few seconds, but it certainly can produce the same plots. I'm not doubting R's ability to do what it was designed to do - I'm doubting its applicability to the average office worker.
Imagine you're a random drone working in HR for a company producing nozzles for squirt bottles. You do a lot of work in Excel because hey, it's the lingua franca of the business wo
javascript continues it's relentless march (Score:3)
because it was positioned early in the browser's evolution
that's the big secret
it has no other advantage (well, familiarity with syntax, if you want to advance to java/ c++/ c# i suppose)
now you can write iOS, Android, and Windows code single source with Apache Cordova, and code on the server with node.js
javascript marches on
meanwhile, those who have a pathetic arbitrary need to feel superior have to crap all over javascript and steer beginners away from the language that actually will advance them, in favor of brittle niche choices? why?
javascript has plenty of obvious, longstanding problems and weaknesses
and? who gives a fuck. what language doesn't?
and especially for noobs, it is a great introductory language and should be the primary language for all programming neophytes to learn because of its immediate applicability and, yes, simplicity. a lightweight scripting language is what you want to teach beginners, not how to write an OS
later on, if they become professional programmers, maybe then they can develop fetishes for esoteric languages and derive an artificial sense of superiority from that as well, like some of you assholes
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why not javascript?
because shit breaks. and it doesn't make any sense.
its everywhere, and you can make pictures and games with it....so yeah, big leg up.
but once you get past the first 200 lines and something doesn't work. at all. then someone is
either so stubborn the push through it after hours of flailing, or they decide that programming
just sucks
assembly is actually much easier to learn than js
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not sure if joke, troll, or serious, but thanks for the laugh
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C++ has problems and weaknesses. Java has problems and weaknesses. C# has problems and weaknesses. Python has problems and weaknesses.
JavaScript doesn't have problems and weaknesses, it's a disaster from beginning to end.
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later on, if they become professional programmers, maybe then they can develop fetishes for esoteric languages and derive an artificial sense of superiority from that as well, like some of you assholes/quote? lol I'm glad you include yourself in there with the rest of us.
My GF is learning Programming with js. (Score:2)
.... so far, I do not recommend it.
"A great introductory language"
There *must* be something I'm missing.
I see her struggling with syntax errors and logical mistakes not picked up in syntax highlighters or bolt-on delinters. The debuggers are a myriad of pages of DOM inspectors, performance tools, js files she's not working with, options for things she doesn't know about and a maze of files, with very little ability to actually step through your running code to see how your "if" statement executes.
R is not a programming language (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a statistical computing environment. R is much closed to what VB was pre-VB6 - a loosely defined domain specific language with lots of libraries aimed at a specific task. It's not really a general purpose programming language and not a great one to learn if you want to learn to program.
If you do a lot of number crunching and want to move beyond Excel, R is a great choice (as is matlab, s-plus, or any of the others aimed at analytics).
If you do analytics AND want to learn to program, go Python and NumPy/Pandas.
If you just want to learn to program, VB, JavaScript, Python, Java are all good. Just find what you'd like to program and see what languages people are using.
And yes, at some point, pick up a few more languages if you find you like programming.
-Chris
Re:R is not a programming language (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ruby yes, Javascript no. (Score:2)
First of all teaching people to code in Javascript is litterally to condem them to years of demented reasoning.
Ruby OTOH has basic structures which work well together in simpliefied structures ala Smalltalk, so that's n ot a problem. If you need R's capabilities just add on R's libraries.
There are many languages such as Ruby where learning the basic constructs for use as a DSL is a good idea.
this is just nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just taking the facile view that coding is a means to an end. Step 1: learn to code Step 2: ???? Step 3: 90k year job at a startup. =/
It's no different than saying "all the good jobs require a college degree, therefore we should put EVERYONE through college, then everyone will get good jobs". No.
Telling kids that the key to getting a good job is by learning ruby, or JS, or whatever language; is just going to create an environment where there's a glut of substandard ruby and JS coders out there.
If you want kids to be successful, teach them to learn, and to think for themselves -- their interest and ambition is what will be the deciding factor, not cramming CS-lite education down their throats. Because, you can create shitty developers out of people who have no interest in the field, and are only there for a paycheck... but what's the point?
Re:this is just nonsense. (Score:4, Insightful)
in school, they expose children to calculus, music, biology, chemistry, physics, sports, etc.
how many become statisticians, jazz trumpters, geneticists, chemical engineers, cosmologists, professional basketball players, etc?
this reasoning "don't teach programming or we will have a glut of substandard programmers", is, i'm sorry, stupid and i am extremely tired of it. it comes from this place of vain smug exclusivity which is self-serving, mindlessly arrogant, and ignorant of the wider world
we must expose programming to every single child in every single school
why?
because it is now a fundamental building block of the world they live in, and they should know the basic ins and outs
just like math, music, sports, chemistry, biology, etc.
and if some of them want to pursue programming? well now you've also clued in some kids you would have missed. some will suck at it even though they pursue it? oh, this is a new concept to you?
is teaching every kid gym mean professional basketball teams have to cope with a glut of bad basketball players? is teaching every kid chemistry mean pharmaceutical companies have to weed through too many substandard chemists? does teaching physics mean NASA and private space companies are suffering due to too many resumes from physics idiots? do you how see fucking ignorant that sounds?
there is no damage, none, zero, and only upside, to more knowledge
and you are an arrogant with a false sense of superiority, the true uneducated one (on matters of basic social reality), if you think otherwise
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I never said don't teach programming, or logic, or problem solving. (Teaching Pascal for example, goes back a looong ways.)
My point was simply that programs like this treat coding as something that can be produced on an assembly line. It is the exact same thing as the push towards university education in the US. Yes you can confer many more degrees with a watered down, commoditized curriculum -- but the value of the 'thing' you were wanting more of, is now diminished.
Further, coding as a fundamental buil
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programming is a fundamental building block of our world now. i really don't know what to say to someone who doesn't understand that
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You could start by explaining how you came to that conclusion? Repeating an assertion doesn't necessarily make it true (or convince anyone that they should agree with it.)
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i have trouble trying to explain it because i can't fathom a person who would speak on this topic and not understand such a simple point
how about this:
how many functional adults in the western world do you know who does not have a smart phone? does not use a computer? soon code will be driving our cars
how does it work? how does code work?
that knowledge is therefore now a fundamental aspect of modern existence
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Bricks are also a fundamental building block of our modern world. But I'll be damned if I know how to make one.
Not everyone needs to know everything. I love to code but I also appreciate that my friends who build houses for a living could give a shit about learning to code.
I'm amazed that people on a tech forum don't get that.
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apparently you never played legos tinkertoys or lincoln logs as a child
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Feeding a troll here, I know...
I'm pretty sure I had more Legos than you growing up. But, I didn't make the Legos, I built with them. I also was never under the delusion that my lego skillz would translate to a job building lego buildings. It was a fun, creative activity that required allow no learning and occupied most of my childhood.
The current push for everyone to program is the exact opposite of that. Learning to program for all but us autodidactics requires coursework and commitment. Sure, once you ca
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Programing is simply give formal instructions to perform a desired goal, then of course validating that the following instructions achieves the result. If the average person could actually give and follow simple, clear and consise directions, the world would be a far better place; or at least microwaves and VCR wouldn't flash 00:00 all of the time.
Mark lead them... (Score:4, Insightful)
...by the nose, straight to his own end goal - a larger pool of cheap labour skilled in the basics needed to produce web applications. By increasing the supply, they can take advantage of market economics to vastly reduce the amount of money they need to offer these people.
I'm not saying they shouldn't learn JavaScript, it's a good place to start and is pretty ubiquitous. It's just lucky for Mark that they are pushing JS and Ruby, very lucky.
Honestly though, saying all those people need to code is like saying I need to learn how to write a sonata in order to listen to music.
Most people would be capable of pushing out a few snippets of code, mostly cribbed from some website - but will flail and cause incalculable damage when they think they have 'da mad skillz bro' and start to write hundreds of lines directly running SQL script from the web page. I've seen the results when an accountant decides their use of Access and Excel means they can code big systems. It wasn't pretty, it broke down frequently, it had dozens of manual steps and adjustments to make each month and it took 5 hours to run. I left that job the second I could.
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"Honestly though, saying all those people need to code is like saying I need to learn how to write a sonata in order to listen to music."
You don't need to learn how to write music to appreciate music. But if you do it's likely you will appreciate music much better. And if you want to be a performer I - and musicians I've spoken to - think it's a *really* good thing for performers to learn how to write music even if your career will be only performing, not composing: it gives you a different way of looking a
Business professionals doing data analysis (Score:1)
Know Your Objective (Score:2)
The problem in our Chris-Bosh-codes-so-should-you society is that people learn to code without first asking "for what purpose do you want to use code?" What in your day-to-day work could you actually automate using code?
That right there summarizes the main issue. In my experience, far too many approach programming with the I'm going to learn programming mentality. This is fundamentally flawed, since there is more computer science than one can possibly hope to learn in a life time. It very much all comes down to having the fundamentals (an online course in any language will work for this) and then settling down to working towards an objective. Your objective doesn't need to be anything grand: you are far better off starting
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cat *txt > all.txt
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write.table(rbind.fill(lapply(list.files("."), read.delim)), sep="\t")
That's a lot of operations to complete a simple task. Here's an alternative for DOS if you don't like linux:
copy
I'm sure it could be accomplished in a more straight forward manor in powershell too. I guess I just don't find it a compelling example of how R can increase your productivity. I see it as an example of code that's not very readable.
But but but (Score:2)
Go R, Young Man
But it's not International Talk Like A Pirate Day for months!
learn Python instead (Score:1)
Don't learn R, learn Python instead. Like R, Python has tons of support for statistics, numerical computing, and machine learning, and pretty much whatever you want to do in R, you can do just as easily in Python (with matplotlib, SciPy, pandas, and a few other packages). Unlike R, Python is also widely used for general purpose programming as well.
Actually, this will help women (Score:2)
"Go R, young man" - what is the end result? A surplus of men who have irrelevant knowledge (not just in programming, but in R of all languages) while women go on to become life-long careers as doctors, etc. (as opposed to "you're too old to develop software" at 40).
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The problem is data jobs don't scale, same as many other jobs. Let's take an old-style job - newspaper reporter/editor/etc.
100 times the population will not support 100x the jobs in that industry, as individual newspapers grow market share.
The same applies to data. 100x the data doesn't require 100x the "data massagers", any more than 100x the computers requires 100x the number of operating systems, or 100x the word processors (and programmers to create them).
Anyone pushing their kids into learning how
Why I learned to code? (Score:2)
That's scary... (Score:1)
Telling people to learn R is scary. There's enough terrible stats work out there already, and without a stats background and a shit ton of reading it's going to be hard for the average person to produce analyses that look like they could be useful, but be wrong or horribly misleading.
It's also not that great for a lot of data processing tasks. Many business folks would be better off learning VBA or SQL depending on what tools the company uses. You don't need R for basic summary information. You can do that
Mark Z Says It, So It Must Be So? (Score:2)
Or, go Python Pandas (Score:2)
SageMath (Score:1)
http://www.sagemath.org/ [sagemath.org] should be visited by anyone interested in helping promote (including R) open source software that is numerical in nature. I agree that programming is important if you need answers to tough (realistic) math questions, and SageMath will allow you to explore a number of open-source packages ( NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R, etc.). Really, SageMath needs more users . . . please help!
Hadley Wickham (Score:1)
Bullshit. (Score:2)
Yes, let's all learn the language that has the things 99% of us don't need.
Statistics and R (Score:2)
I think that the logic is that a business professional will benefit more from what a specialized language like R can offer than from the general purpose stuff. The manager is not going to code a website or an accounting database (where the general purpose languages would be useful), however, they may need some sophisticated business analyses or reports that nobody else can do for them - and R is very good for that.
On the other hand, learning R without learning (and understanding) statistics is pretty much p
Hey... maybe you just need a math class (Score:2)
How about after teaching Algebra, but before heading off into Trig and Calculus spend a quarter or two on Discrete Math. Right there in one fell swoop is the foundation of all computer science in one fairly easy to grasp branch of mathematics. Tie that in with a bit of PASCAL or Python and there is your wade into programming without forcing students into a CIS track. For budding programmers, that class would tie their foundation together, and with others it just gives them some insight into how a comput