Hi Roy, Thank you, I?m sorry ? I couldn?t resist fitting in a little dig there because that?s one of my main frustrations with actually using R, and to me it seemed to make some sort of sense because I was complaining about backwardness in a way (so a steep learning curve seemed to fit in). The error messages are so cryptic that I wonder how anyone ever used R before Google (e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27350636/r-argument-is-of-length-zero-in-if-statement). I?m a bit appalled 50% of the responses think correctness and not being a jerk to some fraction of people is a bad thing and trigger warnings have been brought up (in a funny way). I should have done my research and noticed ?quiet is indeed an existing option, though. If I had an R-related wish, it would be that ??slave? becomes ?-Q? in the documentation and is silently maintained for compatibility. My original post came out of watching ?12 Years A Slave? and if you haven?t, I recommend it. The powerlessness and ultra-grating injustice and the irony of slavery being easily justified by the Bible while abolition is not is an experience. Thanks, Ben P.S. Do any R developers actually read this?> On 19 Sep 2019, at 22:12, Roy Mendelssohn - NOAA Federal <roy.mendelssohn at noaa.gov> wrote: > > Hi Ben: > > Without commenting one way or another on your point, your initial post seemed a lot like trolling because of: > >> Let me reiterate that it is 2019, i.e. "The Future", rather than 1970 when >> R was presumably developed, based on its atrocious syntax, documentation >> and usability (I think I only need to say "NaN", "NULL", and "NA"). >> > > You are certainly welcome to your opinions about R, but these comments are totally aside from what I assume is your main point, and because of this my first reaction was don't feed the trolls. > > My $0.02. > > -Roy > >> On Sep 19, 2019, at 2:51 AM, Benjamin Lang <langbnj at gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Dear Richard, >> >> Thank you, that?s interesting. There is also something called an ?etymological fallacy?. I think current usage is more useful here than the ?science of truth?, i.e. the Ancient Greek idea that the (sometimes inferred) derivation of a word allows us to grasp ?the truth of it?. >> >> In current usage, a ?server? is someone who brings you dishes in a restaurant. A ?client? is a customer. A ?slave? is a human being forced to perform work under duress and considered nothing more than a machine, say a dishwasher or a tractor. And in some regions, this echoes on and is offensive and hurtful to some. >> >> A new user, wanting to reduce output from R, would probably reach for ?-q? or ??quiet?. This makes sense in the same way that ??stentorian? is not a good alternative to ??verbose?. >> >> Best, >> Ben >> >>> On 19 Sep 2019, at 10:55, Richard O'Keefe <raoknz at gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> One of my grandfathers was from Croatia. Guess what the word "slave" is derived >>> from? That's right, Slavs. This goes back to the 9th century. And then of course >>> my grandfather's people were enslaved by the Ottoman empire, which was only defeated >>> a little over a hundred years ago. My other grandfather was from the British isles, >>> where to this day followers of the same prophet are enslaving people like me >>> (except for being female). So I'm sorry, but I'm not impressed. >>> >>> How many computers are "servers"? There's that whole client-server thing. >>> Guess what "server" comes from? That's right, the Latin word "servus", which >>> means guess what? You got it again: "slave". Are we to abolish the word >>> "server"? What about the word "client"? Ah, that's part of the client-patron >>> system from Rome, so what about the patriarchy, eh? >>> >>> We are dealing with something called "the genetic fallacy". >>> "The genetic fallacy (also known as the fallacy of origins ...) >>> is a fallacy of irrelevance that is based solely on someone's >>> or something's history, origin, or source rather than its >>> current meaning or context." (Wikipedia.) >>> >>> Context matters. >>> >>> >>> >>>>> On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 at 17:10, Abby Spurdle <spurdle.a at gmail.com> wrote: >>>>> Personally I much prefer backwards compatibility to political correctness. >>>> >>>> I agree with Rolf, here. >>>> And as someone that's planning to write a Linux Terminal Emulator, in >>>> the medium-term future, I *strongly* defend this approach. >>>> >>>> And to the original poster. >>>> Haven't you seen The Matrix? >>>> (Second best movie ever, after the Shawshank Redemption). >>>> >>>> I would prefer the technology to be my slave, than I be a >>>> prisoner/slave to the technology. >>>> >>>> ______________________________________________ >>>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see >>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >> >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > > ********************** > "The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or NOAA." > ********************** > Roy Mendelssohn > Supervisory Operations Research Analyst > NOAA/NMFS > Environmental Research Division > Southwest Fisheries Science Center > ***Note new street address*** > 110 McAllister Way > Santa Cruz, CA 95060 > Phone: (831)-420-3666 > Fax: (831) 420-3980 > e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn at noaa.gov www: https://www.pfeg.noaa.gov/ > > "Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill." > "From those who have been given much, much will be expected" > "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" -MLK Jr. >[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
Not being a jerk is a good thing.
Unthinking political correctness is not the same thing at all.
The point has already been made that the relationship between
a "master" process or cylinder and a "slave" one is
intrinsically
a dominance relation where the "master" tells the "slave"
what to
do. No amount of mucking around with audible or written words
will affect the *meaning*. Even boss/worker is uncomfortably
close to master/slave and is going to trigger anyone who is
triggered by words rather than actual oppression (such as having
someone hostile attempt to control your speech, and intrinsically
oppressive act which presumes that the would-be controller has
some sort of *right* to dominate the potential controllee).
If we ever hear of someone using R who is or was a slave, we'll
ask for *their* opinion on the matter.
It has also been noted that euphemisms erode surprisingly quickly.
In my daughters' generation, the euphemism "toilet" for the jakes
is being replaced by "bathroom" -- with the result that I never
know which room they're going too, we have to use the ridiculous
"bathroom bathroom" to indicate the place where you wash yourself --
and I'm sure another term for the necessary house will be along
soon. In fact, we're already starting to say "wharepaku" (Foh-
Re-Pah-Koo) for clarity. Dear knows what that will be replaced
by. So shunning the word "slave" is not only ineffective, it
won't even be ineffective for long; whatever replaces it will
itself be the target of cries of "being a jerk".
The really annoying thing about this is that it does nothing whatsoever
to improve the actual condition of any living person.
As for NULL, NA, and NaN, you really cannot blame R for NaN.
S existed before IEEE arithmetic, and it's not *that* hard to
keep NULL and NA apart. length(NULL) is 0. There is literally
nothing there. It's what c() gives you. length(NA) is 1. There is
a place for something but it was missing or undefined.
IEEE arithmetic introduced NaN, which means "there should be something
here but your calculation went wrong, the *mathematical* result might
be defined but this machine cannot compute it."
Frankly, IEEE arithmetic made a lot of things simpler, but a lot of
other things more complicated. You should see what it did to
floating-point comparison in C.
As for the syntax of S, it comes from the same organisation as C.
Having used GLIM, GENSTSTAT, SPSS, and BASIS (don't ask), S was a
revelation that statistics environments did not have to be arcane.
As for the documentation of R, it's pretty much the best of any open
source programming/statistics tool I've used, and most impressively,
has a huge library of packages whose authors have also produced
comparatively good documentation, but the standards of free software.
Run time error messages? Yes, they could be improved. Quite a bit.
You've probably heard about the famous Multics error message. One
day, on startup at a Multics site, the machine wrote
Hodie natus est radici frater.
You probably haven't heard about the Burroughs B6700 ESPOL compiler.
One of its error messages was
IF YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS, IMPLEMENT IT.
It's an open source project. If you think an error message could be
improved, you can patch your copy and send the patch to the maintainer.
The following sentence was written by a biostatistician:
"Help files are frequently more than a little obscure."
That was written about a commercial package, not R.
SPSS costs NZD 156/month for one user, or about NZD 1871/year.
SAS prices are scary. I don't know what the licence terms for the
free-as-in-beer "University Edition" are; since I'm no longer at a
university I suspect I wouldn't qualify.
I rather liked GLIM, but it's dead, and the syntax was idiosyncratic.
I also rather liked GENSTAT, but when you look for the price and are
invited to "ask for a quote", my "I-can't-afford-this"
alarm goes off.
Plus the pages I viewed are for Windows only.
Thing is, for the price of one year for one user on one machine,
you could fund quite a bit of error message improvement for R.
As for slavery and the Bible, what's translated "slavery" in the
OT is
not the "chattel slavery" that was practiced in the 19th century.
Slavery was banned in England by William the Conqueror, of all
people, and the first "official" ban on slavery by any religion that I
ever heard of was when the Vatican ruled that the native
inhabitants of the Americas could not be made slaves. Many of
the Abolitionists derived their opposition to chattel slavery from
the Bible. The practice of African slavery was, as a matter of
history, learned from another religion entirely, whose prophet
bought and sold black slaves himself.
Serfdom is close to slavery. ("Serf" comes from "servus".)
http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/429.html
describes the way salt-workers and colliers were bound to the
land in Scotland, so that 'And thus it came about that the nineteenth
century
had dawned before it could be said in truth of Scotland, in the words
of Cowper:?
There are no slaves at home : then why abroad?"'
These were native Scots.
Enslavement is the vile extreme of the desire to control other people.
Let those who oppose slavery oppose that desire whatever form it takes.
(Want to read about man's inhumanity to man? Read "The Gulag
Archipelago.")
Can we perhaps return to helping each other with the use of R?
(excerpts only)> slavery being easily justified by the Bible while abolition is not is an experience. > P.S. Do any R developers actually read this?I've read one or two verses... I also found this (by you): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20362542 Which uses embryonic stem cells. I recognize that they're mouse embryos. However, your article cites at least five other articles (probably, a lot more), that use human embryonic stem cells. You complain about slavery (that doesn't exist), and then prompte murder (which does exist). What does that say about you... And that's ignoring the way you treat animals We slice and dice data, you slice and dice living creatures. Here's two songs about freedom, if you have ears to hear: https://youtu.be/lKw6uqtGFfo https://youtu.be/HAIdo707Sac
Hi Abby, I don?t really understand why you?re upset with me, but a) they?re cultured cell lines, not animals, b) they might cure people, c) I don?t do experiments, d) modern slavery, dated today: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/21/such-brutality-tricked-into-slavery-in-the-thai-fishing-industry . I simply don?t like the word, and it doesn?t even describe what the option does. Best, Ben> On 22 Sep 2019, at 00:56, Abby Spurdle <spurdle.a at gmail.com> wrote: > > ?(excerpts only) >> slavery being easily justified by the Bible while abolition is not is an experience. >> P.S. Do any R developers actually read this? > > I've read one or two verses... > > I also found this (by you): > https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20362542 > > Which uses embryonic stem cells. > I recognize that they're mouse embryos. > However, your article cites at least five other articles (probably, a > lot more), that use human embryonic stem cells. > > You complain about slavery (that doesn't exist), and then prompte > murder (which does exist). > What does that say about you... > > And that's ignoring the way you treat animals > We slice and dice data, you slice and dice living creatures. > > Here's two songs about freedom, if you have ears to hear: > https://youtu.be/lKw6uqtGFfo > https://youtu.be/HAIdo707Sac[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
Please All: While as I said in my first post I am still not convinced that the OP was in good faith to improve R and not a troll (yours to decide), I also don't think attacking a person's research to counter a point that has nothing to do with their research is what is wanted on this mail-list. There is one very simple alternative - don't reply. Ben - members of R-core do read this mail-list, and the fact that not a single one has replied probably tells you what you need to know. -Roy> On Sep 21, 2019, at 3:56 PM, Abby Spurdle <spurdle.a at gmail.com> wrote: > > (excerpts only) >> slavery being easily justified by the Bible while abolition is not is an experience. >> P.S. Do any R developers actually read this? > > I've read one or two verses... > > I also found this (by you): > https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20362542 > > Which uses embryonic stem cells. > I recognize that they're mouse embryos. > However, your article cites at least five other articles (probably, a > lot more), that use human embryonic stem cells. > > You complain about slavery (that doesn't exist), and then prompte > murder (which does exist). > What does that say about you... > > And that's ignoring the way you treat animals > We slice and dice data, you slice and dice living creatures. > > Here's two songs about freedom, if you have ears to hear: > https://youtu.be/lKw6uqtGFfo > https://youtu.be/HAIdo707Sac********************** "The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or NOAA." ********************** Roy Mendelssohn Supervisory Operations Research Analyst NOAA/NMFS Environmental Research Division Southwest Fisheries Science Center ***Note new street address*** 110 McAllister Way Santa Cruz, CA 95060 Phone: (831)-420-3666 Fax: (831) 420-3980 e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn at noaa.gov www: https://www.pfeg.noaa.gov/ "Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill." "From those who have been given much, much will be expected" "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" -MLK Jr.