Category: work

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Should You Develop an Application in R?

NO. Here’s why.

I’ve been developing in R for about 2 years now. It’s not my first programming language. I’ve developed professionally in C and perl and done many other smallish projects using Matlab, ruby, and java. R is awesome for smaller scripts for data exploration and analysis but is lacking as a general purpose programming language. Specifically …

IDE options are somewhat limited. Rstudio is nice, but not on par with PyCharm or InteliJDEA.

Debugging an R is difficult. It’s ok in interactive mode in R studio, but my application doesn’t run in interactive mode in R studio. It runs on a headless linux server and debugging options are very limited in this environment. I have to believe that most applications would be running in a similar environment as mine.

Error handling is problematic. Error handling is based on the common lisp condition system and is supposed to be more general, robust, etc. It doesn’t feel that way. Some have stated that the use of R’s tryCatch is equivalent to java error handling, but this is not correct. On error, R unwinds the stack to the tryCatch calling point and does not provide a file or line number where the error occurred. Java does not unwind the stack and make it impossible to know where the error occurred. On top of this, R’s error messages can be quite cryptic.

Documentation can be very hard to follow. R has a built in documentation system that provides information by using ‘?command’. There is a lot of information built into the system, but it is not always well written, can be hard to follow and the examples do not provide results. For example, the following details the examples for the ‘summary’ command:

summary(attenu, digits = 4) #-> summary.data.frame(…), default precision
summary(attenu $ station, maxsum = 20) #-> summary.factor(…)

lst <- unclass(attenu$station) > 20 # logical with NAs
## summary.default() for logicals — different from *.factor:
summary(lst)
summary(as.factor(lst))

You can run these examples by typing example(“summary”), but it would be much better if the output was in the documentation like most programming language documentation.

R is a functional language, but has had multiple OO systems bolted on over the years. The 2 main OO systems are method dispatch based systems which is probably not what most would consider to be OO. There are at least a few other OO systems that are more modern, but not so prevalent.

Scattered throughout the R documentation are warnings to discourage developers from using for loops due to speed problems. Developers are instead encouraged to use vectorized functions and the apply family of functions. Trying to avoid the use of for loops feels very unnatural and I have wasted way too much time trying to accomplish it and feel like it is an unnecessary objective. If you are developing an R library for S3/S4 functions then worry about speed if you need to. If you are writing your own application then worry about writing clean, easy to follow and understand logic as you should with any language and deal with performance issues if/when necessary.

R does have some nice attributes and an incredible number of packages available. But if I were to do things over I would use Python over R for anything besides single file analysis scripts.

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Impressive Meeting Venues

Found this place while jogging in Berlin. If you are looking for an impressive place to hold a meeting, this might work. I’ve stayed in the area before and the neighborhood is excellent. Plenty to see and do within a 10 minute walk, most of which is free.

I was thinking that there has to be companies that specialize in finding and organizing events in cool venues like this, but after searching around there doesn’t seem to be. Maybe they exist but are so boutique and work with long term clients and so don’t advertise much?

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Intellectual Theft

I was talking with a colleague / customer recently who told me about a bad situation with one of their vendors. They made a purchase from the vendor and installed and commissioned the equipment. They (the customer) had an idea that they thought may enhance EAF performance by utilizing the equipment in a way that the vendor had not anticipated. He noted that they asked the vendor about it and left it at that. They found out later that the vendor patented the idea. Considering that the backlog at the USPTO is about a year, the vendor must have fast-tracked it.

Things like this bother me. At a minimum this is very un-ethical. If I were the customer I would try to not do business with this vendor in the future. Unfortunately this customer has no choice at this point.

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What Is Your Management Philosophy?

I was listening to an interview with a CEO and he was discussing the weight they put on the interviewing process. One of the questions he asked potential managers was what their management philosophy was. I had to think for a minute how I might answer that. It would be something like this:

  1. Treat management of your group like a democracy. Everyone gets to participate.
  2. Properly incentivize your teammates so that their efforts are focused on the correct goals.
  3. Encourage your teammates to take risks. Improvement can’t happen without risk. And understand that they will make mistakes and that you can’t come down too hard on them for it.

I would probably leave it at that. Nice and simple.