1 Why R?
1.1 Hadley Wickham
Hadley Wickham lists 11 reasons for choosing R in section 1.1 of Advanced R. He introduced this section with a paragraph that ends, “…R is, at its heart, an elegant and beautiful language, well tailored for data science.”
You should pay attention to what Wickham says about R. Wickham wrote ggplot2 and other significant packages for R. Wickham is the Chief Data Scientist at Posit, which is the company behind R Studio and the tidyverse. Wickham is a leader in the R community. Wickham was described as “R’s most famous developer” by Kopf (2019). Wickham is quoted in that same article as saying, “Use whatever makes you happy.”
So, use whatever makes you happy! R is not perfect, but it is worth learning and is enjoyable to use.
If you are already familiar with Python you may want to consider blending R and Python for the best of both worlds with the advice from Wickham and Bajuk (2019).
1.2 Community
The R community loves to share!
The Big Book of R has information on over 300 R related books ranging from the basics of learning R to applying R in disciplines like finance, geology, and health care. Most of these books are free and were written using R, just like Dr. Straw’s Rx. I used Quarto, the “open-source scientific and technical publishing system”, which can be used for HTML books, PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, and more.
R-bloggers.com is the best news aggregator for R. You will find a consistent stream of suggestions, helps, and example projects at r-bloggers. R developers love to share their projects, which provides a great source of learning new methods and solutions.
The tidytuesday community project provides data for weekly challenges that provide the opportunity for you to “learn in real-world contexts.” The project includes a podcast and solutions at the end of the week.
1.3 Industry Surveys
The methodology of industry surveys vary widely. Looking at the results of several surveys can provide a reasonable picture of the popularity of a language.
The IEEE Top Programming Langages 2022 places R in the middle of the pack for charted langauges.
The Data Science Software Popularity Update for 2022, by Bob Muenchen at r4stats also places R in the middle of the pack for charted languages.
The Redmonk Programming Language Rankings for June 22 shows are near the top of the pack for charted languages.
