--- On Wed, 5/6/09, Farrel Buchinsky <fjb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is R an appropriate tool for data
> manipulation and data reshaping and data
> organizing? I think so but someone who recently joined our
> group thinks not.
I only do small scale projects and am by no means a programmer. Isn't Perl
something for earings?
That said, I find R to be extremely useful at data manipulation and have used
it exclusively in my last three projects. The different data structures alone
are worth their weight in gold, if for nothing else than making it harder to
make stupid mistakes in coding.
> The new recruit believes that python or another language is
> a far better tool for developing data manipulation scripts that can be
> then used by> several members of our research group. Her assessment is
> that R is useful> only when it comes to data analysis and working with
> statistical models.
Any reason that she thinks this? How well does she know R? It is not exactly
a language that one picks up in a week, especially if one is coming from using
a stats package like SAS or SPSS. As an ex-SAS and SYSTAT user it took me weeks
to just get comfortable with the power of subscripting and the ability to do
all kinds of calculations "in-line".
> So what do you think:
> 1)R is a phenomenally powerful and flexible tool and since you are going > to
> do analyses in R you might as well use it to read data in and merge
> it and reshape it to whatever you need.
Definately. I am not a computer scientist or a statistician. I usually am
working as a single contractor and normally with small datasets as part of a
larger project. R does what I want, usually very elegantly (albeit perhaps
after a lot of headbanging and calls for help to the R-list) and it would be
stupid for me to use more than one language when it is not needed.
Another plus is that I can easily leave my data analysis work and a working
copy of R with the client. He/she may have a problem seeing what I did but it
is clearly readable & replicable by either the client or another consultant.
> OR
> 2) Are you crazy? Nobody in their right mind uses R to pipe
> the data around their lab and assemble it for analysis.
Well I don't work in a lab but why complicate things? If everyone is using the
same tools then you have a good situation. Others who do work in labs can
address this point more cogently
>From a personnel point of view do you expect everyone in the lab to be
>proficient with R and, for example, Perl? What happens when/if you lose your
>Perl expert(s)? I've had occasions where I waited a week for data simply
>because the division's MS Access "expert" was on holiday and the only other
>"Access" person there only knew how to enter data and run the monthly reports.
> Anything more complicated required the "expert".
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