The purpose of R as a high level statistical programming environment is to abstract away from these things, and to allow users to focus on data cleaning, wrangling, and visualisation. R users are not typically interested in the big-endian/little-endian distinction. Few of us care about the IEEE 754 standard for encoding floating point numbers. Because of this design focus, R users tend to care most deeply about the tasks that make up their day to day jobs. R is a language designed with a practical goal in mind: it is a tool for statistical programming and data analysis. Nevertheless, a very large proportion of the R community don’t have a traditional computer science background – and that’s okay! In fact, given the goals of the language that’s a good thing too. Software engineering practices have now become widespread in the R community, and that’s a good thing. One thing that stood out to me in his talk – and I’ve seen reflected in other data – is that R is unusual as a language because it’s not designed primarily for programmers. – William Van Orman Quine, 1960, Word and ObjectĪt the 2018 useR! conference in Brisbane, Roger Peng gave a fabulous keynote talk on teaching R to new users in which he provided an overview of the history of the language and how it is used in the broader community. Manuals for translating one language into another can be set up in divergent ways, all compatible with the totality of speech dispositions, yet incompatible with one another Floating point numbers and the desert of the reals.
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