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Comment by cardosof | Hacker News Reader

Not really related to the post but since R is so rare here in Hacker News, I will ask anyway: is R still worth using in 2022-23? Even RStudio gave up it's R brand to focus on Python.

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R has much much better statistical packages that R, if it is statistics, you can probably find a package in R to do it, not same with python. And the programming language is much better for statistics than numpy/pandas if a package is not sufficient. I use both, and for statistics have no choice but to use R. For data, I use python.

Use it if you find it useful. It still has a much better and more vibrant ecosystem for statistics, including Bayesian statistics and certain kinds of time series analysis. Data.table is also a serious "power tool", although other non-Pandas data frame libraries like Polars might be dethroning it. Also GGPlot is still awesome, even if you can now get it in Python with Plotnine.

There are still several areas where R beats Python: tabular data crunching, data analysis (plotting, stats), finance (econometrics etc...) but it's less and less obvious.

If you work with mostly tabular data, never deploy anything and don't need any deep learning, then it's fine.

Yes it's worth using IMO. Plotting and grokking is better than python IMO.

< Even RStudio gave up it's R brand to focus on Python

Wouldn't R still be the primary language in RStudio, with Python being made available as necessary? Or is the idea that RStudio will turn into a proper Python IDE? Curious what makes you say that RStudio is putting its 'focus' on Python.

They changed their name to Posit so yeah, that's a conscious move away from R.

I think so. It's still better at the things it was always better at, data analysis. I could be biased since it's my main language though.

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