Comment by uptownfunk
Comment by uptownfunk 11 hours ago
Will this fix the problems it claims to? The power of R is the rich package ecosystem. It caters to people who don’t want to think about engineering concerns but want a fast way to access the powers of computation rather than building a scalable system, two very different things. It excels at the former. A new language will not fix this, because this type of thinking has infected the entire package ecosystem. Frankly with code translation you probably don’t need a new language. Prototype in R and code translate to Python or whatever you want to use in prod. Or frankly just do code gen directly in Python so you can skip having to confirm if the results match.
To be clear, I love R, it excels in prototyping but I have seen too many real world struggles of folks trying to move to prod that I would say save it for EDA projects and one time analyses.
I often find I want a specific statistical package that's only in R, but want a more general purpose language for all the other stuff that's involved (parsing, filesystem stuff, error handling etc). I don't want to risk re-writing the statistical methods and all their dependencies in the sensible language, so I end up calling R only for the statistical methods, but I can see this as an alternative.