I never liked R. I didn’t like it for the first time I tried to learn it, I didn’t like it when I had to switch to R as my primary work tool at my previous job. And didn’t like it one and a half year later, when I was comfortable enough to add R to my CV, right before leaving my previous job.
Today, I was reminded of one feature (out of so many) that made dislike R. It’s its import (or library, as they call it in R) feature. In Python, you can import a_module and then use its components by calling a_model.a_function. Simple and predictable. In R, you have to read the docs in order to understand what will happen to your namespace after you have library(a.module) (I know, those dots grrrr) in your code. This feature is so annoying that people write modules that help them using other modules. Like in this blog post, which looks like an interesting thing to do, but … wouldn’t it be easier to use Python?
Boris Gorelik 