Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future?

I'm a non-IT employee (but with a comp-sci background) working in the insurance sector, and I'm currently managing R adoption for a group of about 30 business analysts with minimal programming background.<p>Programming in the business world is screwed up beyond all imagination. The more money a given application is responsible for, the more likely it is that it's a house-of-cards (pun intended for MVS nerds). They're always mishmashes of COBOL, SAS, DFSORT, and random proprietary languages that have never been the subject of a third-party book, and were sold to a company that was sold to a company that was sold to CA Technologies back in the 1970s. Whatever these languages can't do is implemented through Escher-painting constructions of Excel references and VBA macros.<p>So, when people say that R has some issues, I say, "boo fucking hoo".<p>Most businesses suffer from an unnatural separation between IT and the business end. If business people want something programmed, they call IT. They don't learn Python and do it themselves, because Python is a "programming language". R is the first real language that business people are being encouraged to learn, because it's an "analysis environment". You have no idea how often I have to edit the word "programming" out of my presentations for this reason.<p>R will win in business because it's decent, and it's been around long enough to not be scary to managers. I'd be cautious about drawing comparisons to other languages that have undergone big design changes, because, as far as I can tell, the existence of a decent language in the business world is entirely without precedent.<p>(Edit: In case the above came off as sounding like a "non-hackers are idiots" rant, it wasn't meant as such. Many of the people that produce these hideous monstrosities of SAS and VBA code have PhDs in statistics and atmospheric sciences. You can be pretty smart without knowing how to write software well.)

I predict a 10 year campaign of conquest followed by a 30 year death march. R is a complete mess that kicks ass in its niche. There are too many data types and the syntax seems kind of random, but two lines of R can get you publication quality graphics.<p>R is really becoming huge in academia. As far as I can tell, health sciences is the last SAS holdout. I expect it to take over business as well. Biz types will love it because it's so powerful as a scripting environment, but the programmers building and maintaining stuff with it will come to loathe it. R will become the PHP of analysis; ubiquitous but hated, and no one will have the chutzpah to fix it.<p>Random aside, anyone notice that the Kiwis are all over R? The original creators and the guy who wrote ggplot2 among many others.

While there may be a new language that deals with some of the deficiencies of R at an unspecified point in the future, R is here today. It works, it works very well for the tasks it was designed for and is both well written and well supported. Get coding.

I wonder - could R in theory be rewritten as a Python library? If not, why not? Is there any special syntax of R that makes it more amenable to statistical analysis than Python? Performance concerns?<p>It's just a shame to see a whole language popping out of something that could just be a library.

It is still going strong in bioinformatics/genomics. I think it's slower and clunkier than the alternatives, but for stats and graphics it's pretty easy for scientists to learn...

Incanter is a project worth checking out if you use R I believe.

R as a language could use some help. It is painfully slow, a big memory hog (since it copies large objects with abandon), and has lots of language "gotchas". We had a saying where I work: "R is really fast if you write it in C".<p>However, the libraries are great. Anything you'd want in statistics is already there. So I do use it all the time.<p>Just to say something nice, I do like data frames (a two dimensional matrix, where each column can have a different type).

I'm more interested in the education vs. income vs. prestige graph in: <a href="http://blogs.forbes.com/smcnally/2010/11/10/names-you-need-to-know-in-2011-r-data-analysis-software/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.forbes.com/smcnally/2010/11/10/names-you-need-t...</a><p>Looks like there might be a ceiling for prestige, and that income is not as related to it as I would have thought. But, what are the units?

I would love to see Python become the standard language for scientific computing including statistics but right now R is popular and gets it done. Don't get me wrong, R is excellent for its purpose and I like working with it and its many specialized libraries. However, Python is fun to hack away in and is more of a multipurpose language.<p>R works for me right now so that's what I'll stick to.

It think it's more like "abandon Perl/php/javascript/whatever in favour of Python/Ruby/Lisp/whatever".<p>As long as there aren't more than 10 books written about the yet unborn data-cruncher saviour and as long as the brand new alternative isn't adopted in courses, I wouldn't bother -- unless you want to be the saviour's father (i.e. developer) of course.

I believe that over time, it will become the standard for statistical computing in most businesses, eventually displacing much of what SAS does today.<p>It's attractive to embed into databases like Neteeza, Teradata and other analytic databases, and vastly easier to use than SAS.<p>Even if it was rewritten in python, I think that would be unlikely to slow down it's adoption, which is driven by grad-students, researchers and quants who often have no real programming background (and frequently aren't interested in learning more than they need to generate figures for their publications).

Implement data frames and trellis graphics in Numpy/Scipy and I don't think I'd go back to R for much.

I would love to use R for my latest project, but as far as I know you can't create a compiled executable for use in a runtime, live web environment. Anybody know of a solution to this issue?

I do wish they'd change the name, R is such a difficult search term