Courtney Brown describing why students should learn the R programming language. R is FREE, easy to use, and open source. It is often used to do statistics, but it can also be used for other purposes as well. R has become the primary development language for many statisticians, and undergraduates and graduate students can improve their resume greatly by being able to use R. Get R here: cran.r-project.org My website is: www.courtneybrown.com Background images taken by Jeanne Kiritsis and Roberta Kiritsis Note: The comments in the video relating to Pascal refer to previous corporate support for Pascal that was largely abandoned. There is an evolving “grass roots” version of Pascal called “Free Pascal” that continues development.
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18 Responses to “Reasons to learn the R Programming Language”
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Great Video. Post some R tutorials!
Great video!
Thanks Dr. Brown. I have been using R in my studies (Honors and Master) and work (research analyst and land use modeller). I use other packages and language as well, i.e., STATA and Matlab. R is always my No.1 choice.
There is something that I want to add on top of your nice presentation. That is R, as a language, changes that way think about your problems and the way you solve them. When using R, you could feel that you are influenced by in.
I’m running some R code now. I use it and SAS for statistics and, for many other things, Fortran 90. I like R, but the documentation for its stats functions are often very terse in comparison to SAS, for example. This means more time spent scratching your head. Also, SAS, on average, has many more options and outputs per stat procedure, which can be overwhelming. The advantage of F90 is extreme simplicity for basic tasks, and it is very fast. Speed is very important for many applications.
Dear Dr Brown,
I am a masters student and previosly i have been familiar with C and C++ coding language, It has been a long time since I have used any programming language. but recently i want to get back into it. Could you suggest how else i should get about learning this new language. Thank you
Interesting thoughts. Thank you.
Great video, I have recently began learning R myself, am looking at some of of your tutorials now. Thanks for posting!
My experience is that if you know ,or are familiar with, C and C++ you should be okay with R. R employs “objects” and “methods” (also present in C++) since object oriented programming is quite popular. I use the BioConductor add-on package for biological statistical investigations. In the end I use a variety of languages such as Python and Perl but since I’ve started using R I seldom use SAS or SPSS anymore.
Very well described.
why don’t use Python which is widely used around (ILM, NASA, Google)?
I use R and Python. I’m about a hundred times more productive in R. I wish it were multi-threaded but there are work-arounds. I often compare it to Matlab, the main difference being you can write beautiful code in R where Matlab code is fundamentally ugly.
I guess he never heard of Free Pascal. Pascal is alive and well, and I use it as my primary language.
@dagda825
Good point. I mention this in the video comments.
@RenegadeThinking Delphi is alive and well, too. I’ve used Delphi 2010 and it’s an excellent programming environment. Not knocking R, mind you. Basically if the language makes sense and you’re productive in it then that’s all that really matters. Free Pascal does what Java does (runs most anywhere) but with machine code, not a virtual machine
Cheers!
@DanieleNiero Python is a language for mostly making prototype apps. Python is a script language.
Don’t know why, but I’ve always had an affinity for software named with a single letter.
C, R, X
Thank You Dr Brown for the presentation. A few tutorials will be a good continue.
R was the first language I learned, actually, and it was a very POWERING experience. I have come to program pretty complex simulations on that program, mainly simulating datasets from various ficticious wildlife monitoring schemes (to estimate statisticla power).