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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think R is conflating vectors and scalars. It straight up doesn’t let you access scalars.

Hot take: if you are programming in R you are probably using the wrong tool. If you are analyzing, munging, modeling, visualizing data or fitting/training models, you are probably using the right tool.

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If you parse e.g. a json file containing a scalar to an R object, that scalar will be represented as a length-1 vector. I get what you’re saying, but “it doesn’t let you access scalars” would suggest to me that it can’t parse or represent values that are defined elsewhere as scalars at all.

But the scalar is converted to a vector.

And of the top of my head I have no idea how the round trip will end up. Will it spit out a 1 length vector in the json file or a scalar? And which ever you get, how would you do the opposite?

Speak for yourself. Programming in R is amazingly expressive for prototyping. Its semantics are extremely lispy, yet it provides excellent support for fast numerics. It keeps me focusing on the problems I want to solve and provides me the tools to abstract them quickly to handle related problems. Meanwhile, python keeps forcing me to care about pesky implementation details which I don't care about on a first or even second or third pass. I really can't understand people who like python over R. Did you guys not read SICP?

> I really can't understand people who like python over R. Did you guys not read SICP?

I didn't.

I do wonder what you are programming in R, that isn't loading, munging visualizing and fitting models.

Do you have a github you can share? Or a SICP with examples in R?

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