If you avoid the slightest possibility of unpleasant and pointless confrontations, then you’re going to lead a very dull life. I sometimes photograph random people. Never has anyone had an issue with that. Sometimes they approach me and we have a chat. That’s all that happens. I’ve had more chances of being hit by a car than anyone having an issue with me taking pictures of them. Boils down not being a dick about it.
When we were travelling in the Andes, we were warned multiple times to not take photographs of local peoples without their permission as they could take offense. Seems like a reasonable position but should the wishes of people in the Andes be respected while those of people in Europe ignored? If so, why?
Is it standard for people in the Andes to take offence at people taking pictures of them? I don’t know, maybe it is, haven’t been there. It is not in Europe.
It doesn’t matter which definition you pick. I e.g. had it defined axiomatically when I studied, i.e. we were given a list of properties which identify exp unambiguously and then we were given a proof of its existence. The fact that those properties were part of the definition doesn’t take away from their profoundness. The function could still just not exist. Same thing with defining by formulas. The map is not the territory.
Are they going to drop RStudio? I very much prefer its Qt interface over whatever VSCode invented. It’s fast, has nice keyboard shortcuts, none of that pointless padding and it just feels great to use.
Hey! Product Manager for RStudio here (and Positron).
We have no plans to stop development or maintenance on RStudio, and are committed to it for our users, both paid and community. While Positron and RStudio have some features in common, some R-focused features will remain exclusive to RStudio. If you're currently using RStudio and are happy with the experience, you can continue to enjoy RStudio. RStudio includes 10+ years of applied optimizations for R data analysis and package development.
I was a huge fan of RStudio and was pretty much the biggest reason I used R. But then I realized how bad R is, syntactically, and how much more useful Python and it's ecosystem are. Then I discovered VS code and Jupyter notebooks in VS code which completely sealed the deal. So unless you are in need of specific R data science packages, Python seems like the way to go. I'm quite excited to try Positron!
R has the best syntax of any language I have used. What I hate about R is not the syntax, its all the functionality inside it that was written in hairy C and FORTRAN style. Unfortunately, any system gets written on top of by programmers of legacy systems. The syntax and semantics of R are probably the most elegant of any language I have used. The rules are extremely simple, logical, and transparent and are largely inherited from Scheme. The amount of power it gives developers is unparalleled outside of Common Lisp. So much can be redefined by users. It really is at its core a LISP wrapped in C clothing, but better because few people working on R care at all about compiler optimization. Instead, they all care about late binding and introspection so programmers can figure out what their code is doing. If speed is needed, use C++ (Rcpp). However, in practice R is usually fast enough. Somehow the R developers understood Knuth's proverb that premature optimization was the root of all evil (and wasted effort), but the rest of the world forgot.
I don't know. I bought into the Python hype and after a few years I've found myself missing R. If you're using the full python ecosystem more power to you...but for straight up data analysis and statistics, R is unbeatable.
RStudio was based on QtWebKit, then migrated to QtWebEngine, then finally migrated to Electron (which is what it uses today). You'll find some vestigial Qt code in the repository but it isn't used for the shipping releases any more.
The base graphics packages make the plots as ugly as the ones generated by gnuplot though. ggplot2 on the other hand has very pretty output. And the concept of grammar of plots just makes so much sense to me.
You can make plots look however you want with base graphics. ggplot2 users mainly use the default settings honestly, you get that classic grey background plot I personally find more ugly than the cleaner white background defaults of the base package.
That's only true IMO of the in-IDE plots, but actual exported PNG or vector graphics I think base R plots are pretty perfect, other than perhaps the default colour palette
This can’t be answered in general. Flamegraphs are measurements of what happened. But just like a ruler doesn’t tell you whether a given human is atypically short or tall for its species, a flamegraph can’t tell you which portion of the program takes too long a time. You need to have prior knowledge about data structures, algorithms, memory bandwidth etc in order to confront your justified expectations with the reality and be surprised with something. And it will all depend on the particular program you profile.
This has nothing to do with GCC being a first-class citizen in Linux. It’s a kernel feature. The kernel doesn’t care which compiler or debugger you’re using. You can dump core of any process regardless of the language it’s written in. Every modern OS supports that.
Bloomberg Terminal is a hardware/software dynamic duo!
Reuters and Dow Jones have competitive packages too.
Other software in finance:
kdb, for time-series analytics [0].
AmiBroker - amazing tech analysis package, and AmiBroker Formula Language (AFL - found this because I like J and APL), an array-based PL with debugger built-in to the AmiBroker platform. Fast [1].
I have been programming since 1978 starting on a Commodore PET 2001, but I saw computers and programming as tools. I was studying neural nets and genetic algorithms in the early 90s. I gravitated to lean, simple and easy software, but somehow every software I use just seems so bloated, in-your-face, inefficient, that I have chosen simple tools to use now. I keep a J interpreter open on my desktop along with Frink as more-than-desktop calculators. I use a Home edition of Mathematica, the orginal notebook interface, that has so much curated data and built-in functions that what was once complicated is now a great ecosystem to do math, analysis, reports, engineering, etc. And, yes, Excel, no matter how much it is disparaged by programmers. I gave up Inventor and other CAD programs for Alibre Design (yes, I have SolveSpace on my toolbar for fun!). I am so glad I steered clear of IT/SW engineering/etc. after speaking to many in all parts of the industry. The tool is their job, not the thing the tool does.
PS: I have run hundred-million-dollar construction jobs in SE Asia and MENA using WhatsApp in the field from my Samsung Note to annotate drawings, photos, etc. even though Slack and high-end PM programs were back in the office.
KDB is the epitome of finance software. Cool in theory, and a decade ago probably the right choice if you needed to separate compute/storage and just get crazy high performance, but god damn I hate actually having to deal with it. Would rather DuckDB or even just Polars every time these days.
