You're showing your age
Posted by Jared Flater
What a…humbling article, in more ways than one! First of all, it strikes me how old the language is in comparison to how I feel learning it! Sometimes it makes me feel better, as I struggle to learn new computational skills, to consider myself on the cutting edge of technology and that few people even know one computer language. Then we are exposed this piece on the creation of R, what an insight! Gone are my feelings of cutting edge, R is nearly as old as I am and based on languages that are older. The article really helps one to understand the mechanics of the language that we are tapping into. Some of the vocabulary was a little over my head, but I can see how valuable this will be in the future as my understanding of R increases. I’m motivated by this article to explore similar ones on: BASH(Shell), Python and some day, time permitting,…C.
The other humbling aspect I felt from this article is just the sheer amount of knowledge, work and who knows what else that goes into the creation of a computer language. This was some great insight and history into R and with time I hope to be able to understand all of what the authors are talking about…for now I’ll do with learning how to use their creation to save gobs of time creating statistical figures from my data. For which I’m extremely grateful!