Comment by treypitt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by treypitt | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I actually love RStudio for what it does. In general I'm a huge CL advocate; RStudio is basically the only time I'd rather use an IDE than the terminal. Looking at data, code, and plots simultaneously is easy - I haven't found anything as elegant for Python, including pycharm.

Yes the language itself has problems. It's 1-indexed for God's sake! But if you stick to what it's good at (dplyr, ggplot2), you can get a lot of mileage. What Linus Torvalds said about C++ programmers probably applies doubly to R programmers - so yea comments are going to be sparse. And if you venture far from its core competence of data, you're gonna have a bad time. But overall Hadly Wickham and the tidyverse are driving the ecosystem forward, and R has found a great niche between python scripting and Excel/Matlab

Now that you mentioned tidyverse, let me discuss the ugly side of R. You are right, R community and ecosystem is being pushed forward by Rstudio, the company and people behind it. Tidyverse is truly great and R without it would have not been where it is now. However, Rstudio is a company and they want to earn money, sure, they are contributing heavily to the open-source R but that might change, or they use their influence to steer the development. I’m not saying that they would but they could. I see it more and more that R codes relies on APIs that Rstudio expose. What if Rstudio decides to keep more of its product locked. You can see a part of this already, Rstudio team (company) sells essential security as a feature. What if this extends to R and Tidyverse. Sure, there is license and what not to protect it but that could change. Looking back at the history, this is how the whole Matlab has started!

Again, I’m not saying that it will happen, but it could. Dependent of R on third party packages and a company to push it forward it’s not necessarily a good thing.

P.S. Python IDEs are crappy too!

Tidyverse is currently GPL3 licensed, so that code will remain open even if they were to change the license for future releases. If they made it so onerous and restrictive then presumably less people would use it, to the detriment of the community. People may just move over to another language like Python.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com