Learning the alphabet in 4th grade?
What else would learning R mean? The programming language?
Eli5?
R is a complicated statistics programming language usually used by people in undergraduate and post graduate STEM degrees.
I barely even write base R anymore, I mostly use it for data wrangling these days so my code is almost entirely tidyverse. Every once in a while I get to bust out some statistics, but rarely.
I have been IT support for medical researchers and that application is a BEAST. Installing and configuring it can be a nightmare. Especially when the researchers aren’t proficient in it already. Watching someone who is good at it is like watching the pinball wizard.
What’s nightmarish about the installation? Is it because medical stuff is still on like Win XP?
Installing on more modern Windows systems is pretty simple. Install the R distro from CRAN + almost certainly RStudio from Posit. Should be pretty plug-and-play. Not nearly as fiddly as LaTeX installs are.
I use python as my main programming language, I’m doing an MBA in actuarial sciences and all my professors use R, so all the classes and exercises are in R. They are kind enough to accept my exercises and exams in python, but I spent half my time translating R functions to python. This pass week I found the first function that doesn’t exists in python and had to learn how to run R code inside python. Just the cell of that function took 6hs processing, because of the back and forth between python to R to python again.
… complicated? it’s a pretty easy language in comparison to others, it’s simple to use (although it can be quite terse)
For the untrained eye can look complicated because it had a pretty unorthodox syntaxes, like <- to variable assign, c() to create a vector, df$column… and other little R specific things that are not common on other languages.
Give it a few years, they’ll be picking it up in middle school at least
My daughter has been scoring very high in math this year in fifth grade so they wanted to give her more advanced stuff to do, like moving into basic statistics. She isn’t having any of it though, she hates math and gets terrible anxiety from it. She just wants to sculpt and make puppets instead. Can’t say I blame her, I was the same way.
…yet I’d cherish a job where I’d just spend all day futzing around in R
I always got straight A in maths in high school but never like it, when graduate went to film school and after a couple of years working on TV and films I got tired of the bad pay, the job insecurity and the constant need of networking to catch projects. So I decided to look inside into coming back to college not for something I liked but for something I’m good at, and got myself a degree in actuarial sciences. I miss being able to smoke weed while on the job, but the pay is way better, there’s always a job lined up if I get tired of my job and at the end, I learned to enjoy maths and to solve problems.
Maybe if you show her all the beautiful mathematic graphics and functional 3d models, you can show her that she cN learn to love something that she’s naturally good at.
