[R] Some general comments

Richard O'Keefe
Sat, 14 Jun 2025 23:15:20 -0000

Avi Gross asked ?i often wonder what would happen if someone took a
language that was decades old??. Welcome to F.  F is basically modern
Fortran without the cruftier old bits.

I note that I have some software written in the 1980s in C which no modern
C compiler will accept (not my code, although I maintained it for a while)
and I stopped using C++ because of version to version breakage.  PERL 6 was
so very different from PERL 5 that they stopped pretending it was PERL.

The fundamenal problem is that the rest of the world doesn?t stay put.
 ?The last Windows? will be replaced in October by windows 11 and Windows
12 (which may but probably won?t fix some of the worse issues with 11) is
on the horizon.  R was born when nobody would have dreamed of trying to run
it on a phone.  We used to use 8 bit character sets, the unicode rescued us
from the 4-byte character set threatened by ISO, offering us a 2-byte
practical alternative (see Java) and then Iso 10646 and Unicode merged and
we ended up with 21-bit characters, the defined subset of which is
constantly growing, and features are introduced, deprecated, and
resurrected.  32-bit machines are superseded by 64-bit machines, and then
we find credit-card size 32-bit machines we?d like to use.  Suddenly we
have ?AI? everywhere, writing clean highly plausible and dangerously wrong
code.  How long before someone starts asking for voice driven AI support in
R.   (I wish I was joking.). And don?t get me started on the current Xorg
issue.

I do share the OP?s concerns; I just don?t see any other system doing
substantially better, especially open source ones.

One thing that I would find helpful is that when a function is dropped from
core R, the documentation page should explain how to convert uses of the
defunct function to the newer form, or at least point to such
documentation. This doesn?t always happen.

As for splitting into different library/universe ?dialects?, the only way
to avoid that is to stop people using the language. Ever looked at
Jacascript?  One language I occasionally use has at least three
incompatible unit testing frameworks.

On Sat, 14 Jun 2025 at 9:25?AM, <avi.e.gross at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would add to what Jeff replied. Many and perhaps most or even all
> languages that have room for evolution, including Python, can end up
> getting
> more and more complex with multiple ways to do things but it generally is
> possible to write many useful programs in the core language.
>
> I often wonder what would happen if someone took a language that was
> decades
> old, and examined a recent version and used the results to create a new
> streamlined language in which many choices are simply removed and some
> newer
> ones are used instead. Consider the endless number of ways you can now do
> formatted printing in python including various versions of strings. In R,
> some of the ideas have been made available in the glue package in the
> tidyverse which many people do not know about and others use instead of
> much
> of what is available in basic R.
>
> I think having choices is great for programmers but as noted, makes it
> harder when hiring people to see if they fit. But, IMNSHO, any programmer
> you hire that is not able to rapidly get on board and read manual pages or
> sections of books showing how to use features, may not be the best hire. I
> know I have been hired in situations where my experience was of different
> operating systems, programming languages and editors/environments and
> switching was not hard because I had a flexible background. Over years, we
> kept shifting and I kept up while some others who knew ONE THING were often
> struggling.
>
> The reality is that R was written so long ago that it would rapidly have
> been less and less attractive to some programmers if it stood still. Some
> of
> the concerns mentioned are reasonable and some have solutions such as
> taking
> a snapshot of what versions of things you allow to be used that form a
> stable environment and then not updating anything. A new machine would
> download just the copies needed, as long as the version remained archived.
>
> But is R as bad as Python which split in ways that made many 2.x programs
> incompatible with 3.x and yet some people continue to use the old version,
> which is a bit souped up to emulate, rather than changing the code to be
> compatible? Nobody forces you to use dplyr and frankly, it has similar
> issues as the tidyverse once built has been changed often enough so my
> older
> programs often tell me functionality has been, or will soon be, made
> obsolete and the newer stuff may be much more powerful and yet a pain to
> use
> for simple things as they allow ever more abstractions.
>
> I will say that it may happen to R too and a new language named P may be
> offered alongside R that will become more difficult within a year.
>
> But had this happened, R would not have things like a built-in pipe that
> some find useful or even essential.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: R-help <r-help-bounces at r-project.org> On Behalf Of Small
Investor
> via
> R-help
> Sent: Friday, June 13, 2025 7:50 AM
> To: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: [R] Some general comments
>
> Dear R community,
> I have been using R for over 15 years. I want to raise an issue which has
> been haunting me for some time now: It feels as if R is falling apart. I
> try
> to justify this feeling by providing three discussion points:
> 1. Version compatibility issues seem to be on the rise. Very often, you get
> the message that package x was built on R version y (and thus, won't
work
> in
> your version of R). When you update to the latest version of R, you realize
> that not all packages are available for that version. It seems that for
> each
> version, only a (non-predictable) subset of packages is available.
> 2. The overhead of installing new packages seems to be on the rise. It
> seems
> that the packages depend on more and more other packages. The more packages
> you have in the 'foundations' of package x, the more likely it is
that one
> of these causes an error and the whole stack fails. Installing used to be
> easy back in the day: You got a 20 lines' output. Now you get endless
> prints. I may be mistaken but some packages seem to require admin rights on
> your computer which you don't often have on your work PC.
> 3. R seems to be developing into different dialects. You have dplyr and
> tidyr, some people prefer data frames, some prefer tibbles. Some people use
> pipes, some use traditional syntax. Some prefer object-oriented programs,
> some prefer procedural scripts. If you put in a job announcement that
> somebody has to know R, it doesn't mean the same thing for different
> people.
> If you compare the use experience of R in 2025 to that of Matlab, the
> difference is striking: Matlab is concise and clear, R is more and more
> about endless prints. Of course, Matlab is a commerical product, but R used
> to be the same way. I don't know if many other people feel the same
way,
> but
> I think I am shifting away from R.
> yours best,a data analyst dude
>
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> ______________________________________________
> 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
> https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

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