Hacker News Reader

Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

This is, I think, the main reason R has lost a lot of market share to Pandas. As far as I know, there's no way to write even a rudimentary web interface (for example) in R, and if there is, I think the language doesn't suit the task very well. Pandas might be less ergonomic for statistical tasks, but when you want to do anything with the statistical results, you've got the entire Python ecosystem at your fingertips. I'd love to see some way of embedding R in Python (or some other language).

View on HN

There is a lot of way and the most common is shiny (https://shiny.posit.co/) but with a biais towards data app. Not having a Django-like or others web stack python may have talks more about the users of R than the language per se. Its background was to replace S which was a proprietary statistics language not to enter competition with Perl used in CGI and early web. R is very powerful and is Lisp in disguise coupled with the same infrastructure that let you use C under the hood like python for most libraries/packages.

> There is a lot of way and the most common is shiny (https://shiny.posit.co/) but with a biais towards data app.

I tried Shiny a few years back and frankly it was not good enough to be considered. Maybe it's matured since then--I'll give it another look.

> Not having a Django-like or others web stack python may have talks more about the users of R than the language per se. Its background was to replace S which was a proprietary statistics language not to enter competition with Perl used in CGI and early web.

I'm aware, but that doesn't address the problem I pointed out in any way.

> R is very powerful and is Lisp in disguise coupled with the same infrastructure that let you use C under the hood like python for most libraries/packages.

Things I don't want to ever do: use C to write a program that displays my R data to the web.

Plumber is a mature package for building an api in R.

https://www.rplumber.io/

For capital P Production use I would still rewrite it in rust (polars) or go (stats). But that’s only if it’s essential to either achieve high throughput with concurrency or measure performance in nanoseconds vs microseconds.

Plumber is the first solution to this problem I've seen that I'd actually use--it seems like I'd be calling the API from Python or perhaps JS on the frontend, but that's a pretty reasonable integration layer and I don't think that would be a problem.

Thanks for posting!

We tried plumber at work and ran into enough issues (memory leaks, difficulty wrangling JSON in R, poor performance) that I don't think I could recommend it.

You might be interested in https://github.com/posit-dev/plumber2

Reply on news.ycombinator.com