Andy, in response to my griping on #Rstats, asks “What’s wrong with an arrow going both ways!?!?!” In R one can perfom assignment three ways:

a = 2
a <- 2
2 -> a

I’m pretty sure all these things are equivalent. The only subtlety I’ve noticed so far is that to set default options in function definitions you have to use `=`.

This redundancy drives me absolutely nuts as an R beginner. From a human point of view code has two main jobs: to be written and to be read. Now for the first job, having three different ways to assign a value to a variable might be nice? I’m not sure how, but I guess it would be nice sometimes to write a function, then remember that you hadn’t assigned it a variable and do it at the end instead.

For the second job  though, reading R is awful. Now I’ve heard horror stories about perl, so maybe it’s just that I’m used to readable code and that, in the big scheme of things, R is nice and readable. But yesterday, ploughing through someone’s metaprogramming, tearing at my hair as to the obtuseness of everything, I was foiled for about an hour having not realised that the fsking arrow could go both ways.

I think it highlights a big flaw in R. Sometimes it’s like no “destructive” design decisions have been taken since the original work of Ihaka and Gentleman. I spend so much time messing about trying to convert a data.frame of factors into a list of “vectors” of strings or something. It seems that no-one has ever said “OK, we need a way to assign a value to a variable: let’s pick one”. Instead three have emerged. There are two different types of classes (which only seems to have any real effect on the help files). There are loads of data types that are in regular use, with somewhat bastardised names (i.e. a ‘vector’, ‘matrix’, ‘list’, ‘array’ are all different things – a vector doesn’t seem to be a subclass of matrix, for example).

Now, I’m sure that the pluralities in R could maybe be held up to be a good thing. They probably encode subtleties that I don’t understand, and that my bitching is just me exposing my naivety about the language. And I know that R is descended from LISP and S and that its user base either grew up with R or with one of these other languages. Therefore things that are natural to this background will seem alien to someone like me with a MATLAB and Python background. And there’s backwards compatibility to consider and so on.

So don’t get me wrong – I think R is an amazing piece of work, and the communities around R are incredibly devoted and responsive. It’s kind of like the “first” three episodes of Star Wars: there’s an amazing film in there somewhere, it just needs some editorial decisions to be made. Maybe a new “Hadley” language will be born whereby R is completely re-API’d into a single language that only uses data.frames…