Programming Questions and Background
What are your thoughts on R vs whatever other software you’ve used?
I think R is quite robust. I’ve only ever touched SQL, SAS, VBA, Powershell, and Python. It is very similar to Python in how you access dataframes. There are similar lines of thought in data manipulation methods as well.
I’ve only worked with Object Oriented coding at a notable level. Procedural coding I have not gained much expertise in.
What functionality do you like about R? What parts do you miss about your other language?
I enjoy R’s features that I’ve seen from other languages. Piping from powershell, and data access methods like Python are quite nice. Although R is robust and useful, I do miss Python’s vast amount of utility in creating many different things or applications.
Do you consider R a difficult language to learn? If you had prior experience with R, what was it like?
I do not think R is a difficult language to learn. It’s very straightforward, and although some function arguments don’t always tell you every option you have, it is well documented with a supporting community.
My first experience with R was only through the command line as an alternative method to performing some SAS options. Outside of requests by professors, most of the time I used it as an incredibly powerful calculator… limited to the addition and subtraction symbols.
Iris Plot
plot(iris)
The Pain
Here were the different render functions I was playing with to output this blog without stating options in the YAML header.
The winner seems to be the first
rmarkdown::render(“C:/users/dcraig/Documents/Repos/d-ev-craig.github.io/_Rmd/2022-06-09-programming-background.Rmd”,output_format = md_document(“markdown_github”), output_file = “2022-06-09-programming-background”,output_dir = “C:/users/dcraig/Documents/Repos/d-ev-craig.github.io/_posts”, output_options = list(keep_html=FALSE))
rmarkdown::render(“C:/users/dcraig/Documents/Repos/d-ev-craig.github.io/_Rmd/2022-06-09-programming-background.Rmd”,output_format = “github_document”, output_file = “2022-06-09-programming-background”,output_dir = “../d-ev-craig.github.io/_posts”, output_options = list(c(keep_html=FALSE, html_preview = FALSE)))