On 12/11/2008, at 4:28 AM, Terry Therneau wrote:
I've read the back and forth this morning, and I have to side with
Vince.
Well, I've read back and forth this morning and I have to side
with Berwin Turlach --- whose postings were, I thought, extremely
well expressed.
I'm getting heartily sick of Wacek Kusnierczyk's truculent whinging.
(One might also add the adjectives pedantic, dogmatic, and arrogant.)
His ranting, in another thread, about the distinction between `equal'
and `identical' would have been risible were it not so boring.
The whinging boils down to ``R is not perfect, so trash the whole thing
and start again''. This is rubbish.
*Mostly* R is very easy to use and does exactly what the user would
expect. Sometimes it does not do what the user would (naively) expect;
sometimes there are good reasons for this, sometimes not. Sometimes,
though very rarely, it might be possible to change the language so as
to meet naive expectations. Mostly it would be better for the user to
become less naive.
By and large the difficulties arise only in obscure contexts, when
the user is trying to do something sophisticated. If a naive user
tries
to do something sophisticated, then he or she should be on the
lookout for
problems and should check results carefully. In elementary usage there
are hardly ever any problems.
1. Functions that re-interpret their arguments are very
dangerous. The
original question involved a well formed call to a function, which
returned the
wrong answer.
Fair enough comment ....
Bug, design flaw, whatever -- it's a mistake and the best choice
would be to fix it.
.... but it might not be fixable in practical terms, i.e. fixing it
might have worse consequences than leaving it alone.
<snip>
2. The documentation of subset is not in any way clear. I would
never have
been able to diagnose or work around this bug. The issues are very
subtle.
Well, that's true for some value of ``clear''.
I quite often see "it's in the manual so we bear no blame" as an
argument on
this list. We all need to remember that our view of what we are
particularly
close to is a distorted one -- I for instance think that everything
about the
survival package is crystal clear --- and be particularly open to
concerns that
something is opaque or subtle.
I agree with this, for sure.
But I think that the best approach would be to include a warning in
the documentation of subset, to the effect: ``There are subtle and
difficult issues involved in the use of this function. If you don't
understand them, don't mess with it.''
Others have pointed out in this thread that one does not *have* to use
subset() --- anything it can do can be done in other ways. Like those
who pointed this out, I myself have never used subset(), never felt I
had to, and never felt any the worse for not having done so.
<snip>
And let's not shoot the bearers of bad news.
Bearing bad news is not the same thing as bad-tempered and just plain
rude criticism.
cheers,
Rolf
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