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Comment by glofish | Hacker News Reader

Hadly Wickham is a hero of the language, single-handedly tries to wrestle the slippery monster into sanity, I think long term is a losing battle because in the end the language is still borked.

My hat off to him though!

As for the language ... consider this: lapply(), sapply(), tapply(), vapply() each does something different. The language allows two kinds of assignment operators even: a=1 or a <- 1 that are "almost" identical ... good luck, here is a language there are two ways to even assign a value to a name.

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>The language allows two kinds of assignment operators even: a=1 or a <- 1 that are "almost" identical

The <- assignment is normal for functional programming languages. F#, OCaml, S, and more use this operator. This is because the arrow key used to be a physical key on keyboards back in the 70s when FPP was popular and brand new.

The = sign (function assignment operator) is function level scope and <- (assignment operator) is top level scope.

eg:

    median(x = 1:10)
    x  ## Error object 'x' not found

    median(y <- 1:10)
    y  ## [1] 5.5

So therefor,

    x <- 1:10
    median(x)

is equivalent to

    median(x <- 1:10)

It's a convenient feature the language supports. The alternative is how Python does while loops. If anything, R comes out above in this regard.

edit: Python has the := operator which functions the same way <- does in R. I guess Python is catching up on this one.

eg (Python):

    env_base = os.environ.get("PYTHONUSERBASE", None)
    if env_base:
        return env_base

    if env_base := os.environ.get("PYTHONUSERBASE", None):
        return env_base

Note that `median((x = 10)); x` works fine :-)

> here is a language there are two ways to even assign a value to a name.

three ways if you count a <<- 1 for writing in global variables from inside functions (of course, not a recommended practice...)

I don't see what you point is though. So there are several ways to do the same thing in a language, so it's bad? Bad in what way?

As for the lapply, sapply, tapply, mapply, it's very well documented as to when and where you should use them. Sapply applies only on a single vector, and for generalization on larger data structures you use the other "applys". Nothing very hard to comprehend, and this is well explained in the official docs.

> single-handedly

There are many people in the R community working on this together (e.g. Jenny Bryan, Charlotte, etc).

> lapply(), sapply(), tapply(), vapply() each does something different.

The apply situation has been standardized through the purrr lib and dplyr for a long time. They are base library functions that aren't mandatory.

> two kinds of assignment operators even

Consider the custom of using <-. It reduces the kinds of assignment operators to 1. Similar to avoiding from lib import * in python. You can do it, but there are community standards against it.

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