
Dataviz and the 20th Anniversary of R - danso
https://medium.com/nightingale/dataviz-and-the-20th-anniversary-of-r-an-interview-with-hadley-wickham-ea245078fc8a
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tryptophan
I just recently decided to try R to analyze some data ive been generating.
I've always looked down on it as a "worse & less flexible python", but boy was
I wrong. You can theoretically do all the same things in python as in R, but
the R experience is so much smoother. 20 lines of setting up stuff in python
is reduced to like 10 for the R equivalent.

ggplot2 is super intuitive compared to matplotlib. The inbuilt dataframes +
tibbles are just as good if not better than anything pandas does. Besides all
that, the libraries R has seem to be much higher in quality and in number,
than python has, for data-science related stuff.

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jwilber
Can’t view article without medium account .

Seems to work if you view from twitter first:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/W_R_Chase/status/1247154986783514...](https://mobile.twitter.com/W_R_Chase/status/1247154986783514624)

For my input, I think R (in particular ggplot2) is amazing for static graphs
and rapid prototyping. When used with something like adobe illustrator for
polishing, you can make some beautiful newsroom publication quality charts as
well (see BBC).

However, JavaScript is the language of the web, and that dependency will never
be removed from creating high-quality interactive visualizations. (Sure, you
can write wrappers in R/Python, but you’ll still need to know the JavaScript
under-the-hood to do anything bespoke/custom).

~~~
spinningslate
Don't disagree but you can get pretty far before you need to drop into js.
Shiny [0] is one of the nicest UI frameworks I've come across. Period. I'm not
a front end developer and it's always a mental struggle to get started with
something that just looks nice. Shiny does - straight out the box. For
interactive apps (e.g. dashboards) it's really quite compelling.

For non-interactive content, R Markdown is also pretty good. At the risk of
being cast out as a heretic, I prefer Rmd to jupyter for report style docs
(the kind of data science thing jupyter is meant for). Rmd isn't limited to R;
it has multiple back ends including Python (which is also supported in the
RStudio IDE).

So again: not disagreeing. If you need to get the polish that e.g. D3 can
give, you'll need to get dirty with JS. But you can get a pretty long way
before that.

BTW: I have no affiliation with RStudio the company, just a very happy user of
their offerings (paid and open source).

[0] [https://shiny.rstudio.com/](https://shiny.rstudio.com/)

[1] [https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/](https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/)

