Reasons to learn the R Programming Language

[ZwolfZki]

Can you link to some of the more impressive graphics output of R?

[fndmiranda]

A lot of misleading comments here...

R is a powerful language to do statistical analysis & graphics, not to build web apps or desktop systems.

If you want web apps try Java, .NET, Python, C#, C++, etc.

If you want quick and powerful data analysis stick with R, or sell your house and buy a SAS license.

If you want very simple data analysis, stick with MS Excel.

[mattjones969]

If anyone here can help me with my R language work (polygon characteristics), please reply!!

[PoorRichardSaunders]

Learning a new programming language is not even comparable to the difficulty in learning an actual language. Other than that the rest of this video is not stupid.

[TheGrayIntellectual]

What really convinced me of the importance of learning an object oriented language to perform research, in addition to Dr. Brown’s videos, was Dr. Patrick Burn’s article titled “R Relative to Statistical Packages.” The latter warns us against adapting your “thinking to your computing, rather than adapt your computing to your situation. Because of this statistical package straitjacket...” R has a “steep learning curve” but is quite a good time investment for future researchers.

[thekilon]

Why would you want to pay for something that is free. Take a look at freepascal and project lazarus . Pascal dead ? Far Far Far from it. TIOBE INDEX has Pascal as the 15th position while R is at 27th ! Its seems more like R is almost dead. A lot of misinformation in your video and yes i read your more info box, but still EXTREMELY misleading.

[itchy1234567]

R, the worst language ever invented.

Entering in the world of R is like entering in a nightmare.

[RAI20118783]

YOU KNOW HOW TO CONNECT TO SQL SERVER AND R (CODE) THANKS REGUARDS

[SoHoTandCool]

awesome - i talked to one of my professors at my school last week. the professor does bioinformatics and he suggested i learn R. the problem is i am a hard core biologist, who is fascinated by the human genome and want to dig into it using some softwares. my good professor thinks R is the way to go, what do you think? thanks for the information - you are a good sales man, i am already looking into how to download R and put it on my mac.

[FarsightPress]

@SoHoTandCool

I always recommend following the advice of your own professors, since they are the ones guiding your education. On the other hand, you also need to follow your instincts. Thus, I advise doing what your professor says as well as trying out some of the other software that interests you. No need to be exclusive. Explore.

[SoHoTandCool]

@FarsightPress thanks farsightpress... now let's say i am ready to learn R. i haven't done any programming before - can you spend few minutes suggesting where i should begin. i don't see my professor till after two weeks, and the only thing he mentioned was, 'start into looking at programming in R'. i would highly appreciate it.

[bobdylan23220]

@SoHoTandCool There's a pdf tutorial available that you can find in the R program itself.

Also, if you have a question about a particular function, you can always type ?[whatever the name of the function is], and it will take you to a website explaining the function. For example, ?read.table

[Tapajara]

Pascal is a general-purpose programming language while it seems R is a special-purpose programming language for statistics. This makes it very narrow in scope. The speaker must be a statistician and was using Pascal to do statistics.

[off2themovies2]

You can find some tutorials at off2themovies2.

[azamstat]

Good.

[mazeofdevils]

I am an actuarial science student and want to learn aspects of R which will help me in my course.Can you please tell me how to go about it?I would really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot (in advance)

[zwerty007]

R is kind of freaky to look at however...

[supermatti78]

youtube.com/watch?v=KOLkgqeSFP­Q

[r3bol]

Are you worried about things like SciPy (Python language) stealing R's thunder and making it another 'good for the self' language?

[pzmtuthcvpvl]

@ The Author & Speaker --- I have been working to get some sort of real-world program to a shippable codebase. I am going up with a Table ( row x column ) as I write this and will be seeking to make a robust design that can handle sparse-array as well as string to type conversion and just on down the list of standard cs challenges. I have a C compiler & could learn D but to get to market I am concerned about licensing issue that arose with the JVM

[Ramshobraja]

R and python are must learn languages for researchers. Invest in open source!!

[GRIFF74]

Typical Academic. No Pascal compiler exists? What is Delphi then?

[RenegadeThinking]

@GRIFF74

I mention this in the sidebar comments for the video. Delphi is an object oriented evolution of early Pascal. My intent is not to downplay any of the many new incarnations of any language, but to point out that R should be reasonably long-lasting in its structure.

[bowiemott]

@GRIFF74 I used to use Borland's Turbo Pascal professionally so I know something about Pascal. But lets be real. Delphi is hardly a comparable environment to R or Python. Sure you can develop in Delphi but its hardly the tool to manage huge datasets, run numerical analysis, and visualize complex relationships. The user community for R is enthusiastic, aggressive, and there is an abundance of add-on packages for managing research data types. can the same be said of Delphi ? Clearly not.

[clashpeanan]

@GRIFF74 Good point. You can add to that; and what about Free Pascal (FP) an open source compiler, not to mention Lazarus the open source equivalent of Delphi.

[mzedong001]

I am convinced this must have been the language that Fegelein used to rebel against Hitler and find Wallee.

We must capture Fegelein and bring him to justice for his crimes! Fegelein! Fegelein! FEGELEIN!!!!

[ruibjr]

I still use BASIC (blitzplus), for prototyping.

It is pretty easy to use, no complex compiling + linking steps are required, you can check things in almost no time.

I always write the production code in other languages, but BASIC still is, at least to me, the perfect language for testing equations, prototypes, etc...

[OBSysteme]

R was the first language I learned, actually, and it was a very POWERING experience. I have come to program pretty complex simulations on that program, mainly simulating datasets from various ficticious wildlife monitoring schemes (to estimate statisticla power).

[bokxser]

Thank You Dr Brown for the presentation. A few tutorials will be a good continue.

[jessemaurais]

Don't know why, but I've always had an affinity for software named with a single letter.

C, R, X

[dagda825]

I guess he never heard of Free Pascal. Pascal is alive and well, and I use it as my primary language.

[RenegadeThinking]

@dagda825

Good point. I mention this in the video comments.

[dagda825]

@RenegadeThinking Delphi is alive and well, too. I've used Delphi 2010 and it's an excellent programming environment. Not knocking R, mind you. Basically if the language makes sense and you're productive in it then that's all that really matters. Free Pascal does what Java does (runs most anywhere) but with machine code, not a virtual machine :-) Cheers!

[robsteele99]

I use R and Python. I'm about a hundred times more productive in R. I wish it were multi-threaded but there are work-arounds. I often compare it to Matlab, the main difference being you can write beautiful code in R where Matlab code is fundamentally ugly.

[DanieleNiero]

why don't use Python which is widely used around (ILM, NASA, Google)?

[Tank8484]

@DanieleNiero Python is a language for mostly making prototype apps. Python is a script language.

[bytejuggler]

@Tank8484 You have a misconception of Python. You can write GUI apps, console apps, text processing apps, web apps, games, and yes, scripts in Python.

[WOWNumansi]

Very well described.

[drexelmcquimby]

Great video, I have recently began learning R myself, am looking at some of of your tutorials now. Thanks for posting!

[Blaesch]

Interesting thoughts. Thank you.

[nabinraj109]

Dear Dr Brown,

I am a masters student and previosly i have been familiar with C and C++ coding language, It has been a long time since I have used any programming language. but recently i want to get back into it. Could you suggest how else i should get about learning this new language. Thank you

[bowiemott]

My experience is that if you know ,or are familiar with, C and C++ you should be okay with R. R employs "objects" and "methods" (also present in C++) since object oriented programming is quite popular. I use the BioConductor add-on package for biological statistical investigations. In the end I use a variety of languages such as Python and Perl but since I've started using R I seldom use SAS or SPSS anymore.

[xingmowang]

Thanks Dr. Brown. I have been using R in my studies (Honors and Master) and work (research analyst and land use modeller). I use other packages and language as well, i.e., STATA and Matlab. R is always my No.1 choice.

There is something that I want to add on top of your nice presentation. That is R, as a language, changes that way think about your problems and the way you solve them. When using R, you could feel that you are influenced by in.

[caljackshen]

Great video!

[PsycAndrew]

Great Video. Post some R tutorials! :)

[off2themovies2]

@PsycAndrew You can find some tutorials at off2themovies2 on YouTube