Discussion: R

I've been trying to pick up some R as I have time - I spent years doing stuff in Matlab for racing, so it seems useful to transfer those skills over. It seems like a pretty good language to pick up!

Totally! And Tom's now more of a pro in it, since he's taught intro stats, so at least I have someone to bug! =)

Nice. I gotta find a fun project to use it for.

Hadley Wickham's "tidyverse" including ggplot2 is the way to go :)

I like R, on the days I don't hate it. But I only use it for simple things, and not very often anymore.

I hate R. Can't we all just work in Python?

Seriously.

We use R quite a bit for software to support climate information in developing countries because R-based software can be run on an off-the-shelf PC without needing any specialised knowledge, which is useful when you're dealing with, for example, Pacific island countries where the local internet connection is patchy at best, and the entire national meteorological service employs three or four people.

I dealt with a decent amount of FORTRAN at the Norwegian Meterological Institute so it’s not just Pacific Island countries that may present a modern scientist with significant challenges.

Yes, Fortran still gets used for a lot of grunt work in meteorology (especially in modelling) - it may be old-fashioned but it's still pretty efficient for dealing with large amounts of number-crunching. I do most of my work in it.