My (not so hot) take on R

I wasn’t looking forward to learning R…

When I started my first R class almost two years ago, I wasn’t all that excited about it. I was more comfortable in SAS and had dabbled a bit in Python, and I was content with limiting my coding knowledge to those two languages. R just looked… ugly?

After I got over my initial disgust toward the syntax, I realized that the same nasty looking syntax was surprisingly very easy to learn. The more capable I became as an R programmer, the more I realized that I could perform many of the same analyses and render the same plots that I could in SAS, only in much fewer lines of code and often with better graphics.

I especially appreciate the capability to create nicely formatted html pages as well as interactive graphics. Although I miss the visual appeal of a detailed and hierarchically formatted SAS proc step, I can finally say that I prefer R as my primary coding language because of its ease of use, flexibility, and intuitive (albeit ugly) syntax.

Example R Markdown Output

plot(iris)