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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to side with the author here: if he read "Advanced R", "R for data Science", "The R Inferno", "Rtips. Revival 2014!", the official "An Introduction to R", "R Language Definition", and "R FAQ", and yet he still has problems with the language, then maybe the language is to blame.

And even if the author is the problem, I wouldn't accuse them of not reading enough.

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Ok, but if someone claims to have read all the Python manuals and wrote something like

> Python has two types of empty string, array('u',) and ""

you'd probably conclude that hasn't really understood what he read.

For Python (at least Python3) a better example might have been b"" and "". They are not equal, and they are empty. You have to decode or encode one, for instance, and different functions return different things. Then different functions might return False, None, (), {}, etc.

This OP complaint seems like weird nitpicking about R. Many languages have different empty/null-types for different variable-types. Also, don't get me started on "nulls" in C, C-strings, C++ strings, or memory allocation.

All languages are complicated.

does f"" also count as an empty string? Because oddly enough, I don't see anything in that syntax which suggests that it is really a function which returns a formatted version of whatever is in the "".

Or maybe the language just isn't for every one and for every usecase. I would be hesitant to write something customer-facing in R. But it's great for doing statistics. The main problem with R is that people underestimate how different it is and thus don't care to learn practices for writig robust R code.

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