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Comment by larrydag | Hacker News Reader

I'm an R advocate. I call R the "Excel Buster". I think reproducible research is very important and tools should follow. Excel has its place in fast mathematics prototyping but for reproducible research it is quite lacking.

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Vast majority of Excel users would implode learning R.

Can confirm. Source: am an excel user.

I actually think you are more possibly to make mistakes in R than in Excel. Because in Excel you always see the results directly, and you can even easily catch an anomaly in a single cell. But in R it takes one more step to see the results, and you probably won't see results of all the rows directly.

Especially when R really likes to carry on chugging along with your analysis spitting out nonsense values when it should have failed on something 50 lines ago.

    sum(1, 2, 3, 10)
    [1] 16 # great

    mean(1, 2, 3, 10)
    [1] 1 # wait, what?

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