mapcar

There are many great things about the open nature but it also leads to a very diverse experience, depending on which subreddit and thread you visit. Discussions range from asinine to profound, and casual visitors are often quick to generalize their limited evaluation to the whole site.

It's amazing to think that R (or S) had data frames since the 70s and only now are other languages implementing them. There are some quirks of course, and pandas introduced some convenient features. But the R community has also provided its own improvements in the way of data.table, and now, dplyr.

How about PyCharm or Eclipse+PyDev (I've personally heard more praise for the former)? I use emacs and ess or python-mode so can't comment on the IDEs too much but being able to use the same platform for both has been convenient for me.

and if you overwrite variables like "c", you can always invoke the original concatenation function as "base::c".

I agree, I've read other gripes about R function documentation but it's one of the better ones for community software. Python's documentation seems focused on implementation from a programmer's perspective, but often not as helpful for actual application of the function.

Isn't this the conventional way of converting variables which have been coerced to their numeric representations back to time/date classes?

Hi Hadley, yes for instance

> as.chron("1970-01-01")+unclass(as.chron("2001-04-01")) [1] 04/01/01

> as.POSIXct("1970-01-01","EST")+unclass(as.POSIXct("2014-06-01","EST")) [1] "2014-06-01 05:00:00 EST"

If there is any conversion necessary it is difficult to get back the original intended time.

I understood that at least a part of the larger programming community felt that the non-concurrent GC was limiting its future growth and shopped elsewhere for a production language.

In the R Help Desk 2004 (http://www.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2004-1.pdf), Gabor Grothendieck recommends chron over POSIXct classes on account of the time zone conversions which occur when the tz attribute of the latter object is not "GMT". Will this not be a problem with lubridate? Thanks in advance.

Does lubridate solve the unintended timezone conversions of POSIXct classes?

good point. unless it is vi or emacs...

I understand there have been studies showing people don't estimate angles as well as linear distances but people go too far out of their way to avoid pie charts when parts within whole data is shown. The 1D mosaic plot is effectively a stacked bar chart but there I suspect there is also some bias given toward the largest component such that the relative proportions of the smaller components are not well discriminated.

Can't you just create an alias for

`emacs -nw -Q` or `emacsclient -nw`

when you want to open an instance in a terminal?

I'd never heard of dexy before but has anyone tried it?

So what's better?

I find it hard to believe that six years could solidify a culture of monolingualism; what about languages other than German?

The syncing with LaTeX sounds nice. What's imagemagick for? If you can copy text I guess it doesn't convert to png like emacs does now?

This is an interesting model:

http://www.theissresearch.org/

Except MPIs are national labs and not for profit. The U.S. has Los Alamos, Brookhaven, Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley, Sandia, Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, Oakridge...

Is rhdf5 the best library? I understand there is ncdf4 and h5r, and rgdal. I understood that R support for HDF5 was limited so I have not used R much for this purpose.

Again, if you remember to include options(stringsAsFactors=FALSE) at the top of your scripts, they are transferable. With other R neophytes who only run code that I write, I tell them to run

cat("options(stringsAsFactors=FALSE)\n",file="~/.Rprofile",append=TRUE)

at the R console.

This is really well-written. I was skeptical about the title's claim but truly, the author defines what first-class citizens mean and a wide range of cases where the behavior is inconsistent.

I have gotten used to its behavior but only because I use factors sparingly, having set stringsAsFactors=FALSE as my default. But reshape2::melt() requires a separate argument (factorsAsStrings) if you don't want automatic conversion, and with plyr::ldply() you can't prevent the index column conversion to a factor at all. So factors creep in periodically into my data frames and burns me every now and then.

They've agreed to do this site-wide at the Mayo Clinic.

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2007-February/125438.h...

I have adopted this approach as well, and for all the scripts I distribute I set options(stringsAsFactors=FALSE) at the top.

Right, it's the "pretty much" part that's a little disturbing. Would be nice to know why this caveat is always thrown around.

I think the most important thing would be for the community to understand what ports and what doesn't port from the elisp version that everyone uses- until then I don't think many will be able to make an informed decision regarding the risks of migrating.

rms also said emacs should incorporate word processing features too. ...what about that part?

Wow, I haven't seen the licensing model to use a language in a while. Many researchers are migrating away from MATLAB for that reason, and new projects are often not initiated in MATLAB unless it incorporates legacy code. How's this business model holding up?

> If Lisp lan­guages are so great, then it should be pos­si­ble to sum­ma­rize their ben­e­fits in con­cise, prac­ti­cal terms.

His list is concise but man did he take a while to get to it!

Seriously though. The introduction was super relevant as I have wondered the exact same question about Lisp myself. What features make it so praise-worthy? Maybe X-expressions isn't a core feature for everyone to appreciate, but the fact that everything is an S-expression is an understated value. People complain about its syntax, but alternate versions (so many reincarnations of parentheses-less Lisps) have never caught on.

The thing is, Lisp is no longer unique in its feature set, and languages with more standard forms of syntax have incorporated some of its features. But it is uncommon to find all of these listed features in one language. In the domain of data analysis where I do most of my work, it still makes me sad that XLISP-STAT has been supplanted by other languages which leave the user wanting.

Sorry, what language are these example given in?

I am a strong advocate of this method.

However, I have to issue a statement of warning that when an idea doesn't pan out like written out, people will go to great lengths to fulfill their agenda (e.g., put undue pressure on their students to come up with the "correct" result). For computer science and mathematics, it may be more difficult to fudge results. But in experimental work or data analysis, I've seen students suddenly come up with a solution that fits their advisor's expectation.

There has to be some mechanism to guard against this; the most common answer is the moral character and integrity of the scientist, but psychologists and economists will quickly point out that there are gray areas where people are willing to cheat just enough to get their reward while preserving their conscience.