I have been IT support for medical researchers and that application is a BEAST. Installing and configuring it can be a nightmare. Especially when the researchers aren’t proficient in it already. Watching someone who is good at it is like watching the pinball wizard.
What’s nightmarish about the installation? Is it because medical stuff is still on like Win XP?
Installing on more modern Windows systems is pretty simple. Install the R distro from CRAN + almost certainly RStudio from Posit. Should be pretty plug-and-play. Not nearly as fiddly as LaTeX installs are.
What’s nightmarish about the installation? Is it because medical stuff is still on like Win XP?
Anything more than the most basic bare-bones install of Workbench (formerly Rstudio) quickly turns nightmarish. Try setting it up on a Linux dedicated server with AD auth with auto-mounting of network shares per-user. Posit’s documentation isn’t great (or even agrees with itself across pages) even in the simplest best-case scenario, and if you deploy anything that’s even slightly complicated, it turns into a Hellscape. There’s a good chance you will end up on one of the Posit employees’ blog to read an incomplete explanation of setting up a feature because it’s entirely missing or incomplete in the documentation. This isn’t some crazy off-the-wall edge scenario either, it’s an (allegedly) supported configuration and would be a typical deployment scenario in a multi-user R environment.
Their support is absolute shit too, it’s truly fucking atrocious. First-level support will not solve your issue, I promise you that, and you won’t get anyone who actually knows WTF they’re talking about until you’re escalated at least twice. And even then, they are very much up their own ass and have a VERY snobby attitude about the product, and always assume that it’s the user at fault, even when you provide absolute 100% proof that it’s their product at fault. It obviously couldn’t possibly be their Super Precious Perfect-in-Every-Way Golden God Product, because as we’ve previously established before, it is a Perfect Product Which Does No Wrong, Ever. They also love to try and shirk responsibility and say that X is not a supported configuration for literally everything, and then claim that the documentation must be wrong when you point out in their documentation that it is.
Don’t even get me started on the Lovecraftian nightmare that is R package management. It’s even worse than the essay I just typed out, and they want to charge you essentially the entire Workbench license cost x2 to make it usable. Their logging is useless too, it has basically two settings, one of which is essentially “nothing,” and the other is “firehose of bullshit that you need to follow along in their source code to try to find anything useful.” That’s not an exaggeration, I actually had to do that to diagnose an issue and provide proof to them that yeah, it is your half-assed shit product that’s the problem.
So yeah, if you’re not just Click-Click-Click-Next installing it, it very quickly becomes nightmarish. Posit desperately needs competition in the space, because they’re absolute shit, but they can be absolute shit with impunity since they don’t have any real competition.
I've almost entirely switched to using pak for managing my R packages. I'm not 100% sure what the magic is in pak, but it's really made my life easier when installing packages.
I barely even write base R anymore, I mostly use it for data wrangling these days so my code is almost entirely tidyverse. Every once in a while I get to bust out some statistics, but rarely.
I’m a tidyverse zealot and I just cannot stand fixing people’s 300 line base R spaghetti that can easily be refactored into 10 lines of dplyr. Especially annoying when researchers can’t move away from doing everything in matrix format (when it’s unnecessary).
For the untrained eye can look complicated because it had a pretty unorthodox syntaxes, like <- to variable assign, c() to create a vector, df$column… and other little R specific things that are not common on other languages.
I use python as my main programming language, I’m doing an MBA in actuarial sciences and all my professors use R, so all the classes and exercises are in R. They are kind enough to accept my exercises and exams in python, but I spent half my time translating R functions to python. This pass week I found the first function that doesn’t exists in python and had to learn how to run R code inside python. Just the cell of that function took 6hs processing, because of the back and forth between python to R to python again.
I'm not sure if you're using Quarto or not, but use it almost daily and frequently write R and Python in the same file without any noticeable overhead.
darthsid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
R is a complicated statistics programming language usually used by people in undergraduate and post graduate STEM degrees.
thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
I have been IT support for medical researchers and that application is a BEAST. Installing and configuring it can be a nightmare. Especially when the researchers aren’t proficient in it already. Watching someone who is good at it is like watching the pinball wizard.
doctordevice@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
What’s nightmarish about the installation? Is it because medical stuff is still on like Win XP?
Installing on more modern Windows systems is pretty simple. Install the R distro from CRAN + almost certainly RStudio from Posit. Should be pretty plug-and-play. Not nearly as fiddly as LaTeX installs are.
tool@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Anything more than the most basic bare-bones install of Workbench (formerly Rstudio) quickly turns nightmarish. Try setting it up on a Linux dedicated server with AD auth with auto-mounting of network shares per-user. Posit’s documentation isn’t great (or even agrees with itself across pages) even in the simplest best-case scenario, and if you deploy anything that’s even slightly complicated, it turns into a Hellscape. There’s a good chance you will end up on one of the Posit employees’ blog to read an incomplete explanation of setting up a feature because it’s entirely missing or incomplete in the documentation. This isn’t some crazy off-the-wall edge scenario either, it’s an (allegedly) supported configuration and would be a typical deployment scenario in a multi-user R environment.
Their support is absolute shit too, it’s truly fucking atrocious. First-level support will not solve your issue, I promise you that, and you won’t get anyone who actually knows WTF they’re talking about until you’re escalated at least twice. And even then, they are very much up their own ass and have a VERY snobby attitude about the product, and always assume that it’s the user at fault, even when you provide absolute 100% proof that it’s their product at fault. It obviously couldn’t possibly be their Super Precious Perfect-in-Every-Way Golden God Product, because as we’ve previously established before, it is a Perfect Product Which Does No Wrong, Ever. They also love to try and shirk responsibility and say that X is not a supported configuration for literally everything, and then claim that the documentation must be wrong when you point out in their documentation that it is.
Don’t even get me started on the Lovecraftian nightmare that is R package management. It’s even worse than the essay I just typed out, and they want to charge you essentially the entire Workbench license cost x2 to make it usable. Their logging is useless too, it has basically two settings, one of which is essentially “nothing,” and the other is “firehose of bullshit that you need to follow along in their source code to try to find anything useful.” That’s not an exaggeration, I actually had to do that to diagnose an issue and provide proof to them that yeah, it is your half-assed shit product that’s the problem.
So yeah, if you’re not just Click-Click-Click-Next installing it, it very quickly becomes nightmarish. Posit desperately needs competition in the space, because they’re absolute shit, but they can be absolute shit with impunity since they don’t have any real competition.
merari42@lemmy.world 2 months ago
How is Pak better than pacman, which is my preferred package management solution for R.
thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
I’ll admit it’s been awhile but about 10 years ago, it could be a thing. One guy needed almost a week of hands on to get it right.
bobburger@fedia.io 2 months ago
I've almost entirely switched to using pak for managing my R packages. I'm not 100% sure what the magic is in pak, but it's really made my life easier when installing packages.
doctordevice@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I barely even write base R anymore, I mostly use it for data wrangling these days so my code is almost entirely tidyverse. Every once in a while I get to bust out some statistics, but rarely.
blackbirdbiryani@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m a tidyverse zealot and I just cannot stand fixing people’s 300 line base R spaghetti that can easily be refactored into 10 lines of dplyr. Especially annoying when researchers can’t move away from doing everything in matrix format (when it’s unnecessary).
sparkle@lemm.ee 2 months ago
… complicated?
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 2 months ago
For the untrained eye can look complicated because it had a pretty unorthodox syntaxes, like <- to variable assign, c() to create a vector, df$column… and other little R specific things that are not common on other languages.
klemptor@startrek.website 2 months ago
R is made infinitely better with tidyverse.
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 2 months ago
I use python as my main programming language, I’m doing an MBA in actuarial sciences and all my professors use R, so all the classes and exercises are in R. They are kind enough to accept my exercises and exams in python, but I spent half my time translating R functions to python. This pass week I found the first function that doesn’t exists in python and had to learn how to run R code inside python. Just the cell of that function took 6hs processing, because of the back and forth between python to R to python again.
bobburger@fedia.io 2 months ago
I'm not sure if you're using Quarto or not, but use it almost daily and frequently write R and Python in the same file without any noticeable overhead.
darthsid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
See everyone I know who uses R ends up at that point when there’s just no way around learning it and using it 😂
Tagger@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Thank you very much
GreatTitEnthusiast@mander.xyz 2 months ago
ELI4?