How long does it take to learn R? Meaningless question. Who is learning? Are they new to programming? What other programming languages do they know? Are they new to statistics? What other statistics environments do they know? Are they learning by themselves? Do they have a mentor? Fellow students? Which textbooks are they using?
I found R very easy to learn, but I was already familiar with dozens of programming languages and the SPSS, GLIM, and Genstat statistics environments, so my experience will probably mean nothing for you. The R *language* can be thought of as covering several different things: (1) Basic R *DATA STRUCTURES*. By this I mean logical, integer, real, complex and character vectors and arrays (R doesn't actually have scalars) and lists. This is where R differs most from most other programming languages except (S of course and) APL and perhaps Matlab. (2) R *CONTROL STRUCTURES*. The syntax of R and how you write functions in R. R looks a lot like C/Java/Perl except where it doesn't, and the most different aspect of R here is function parameters (which resemble Lisp) and the way parameters are passed. (3) How R data structures are EXTENDED. The S3 and S4 "object" systems. Some of the things like data frames, dates and times, time series, models, and so on built on these. (4) Reflection and namespaces. At this point, you could be said to have mastered the R *language*. It is not a big or complex language. It's much simpler than C++ or C#. However, R comes with a range of testing and documentation tools. And there is a DAUNTING range of packages for an astounding range of statistical and graphical applications. This is actually my plan for learning any programming language: - basic data structures - basic control structures - basic debugging techniques - data structure extension methods - control structure extension methods - testing and documentation tools A word about existing code bases. R code tends to be written by people with a great deal of knowledge and insight about the algorithms they are coding and the applications they are coding for. R encourages the development of good documentation for people who are USING the code, with examples and vignettes and all that. However, most of the people are NOT software engineers and are not writing code with the dominant idea that someone else will have to come to understand the inner workings of the code well enough to maintain it without them. (This is also true of pretty much all the Java and C# code I've ever seen, which is too much of it.) If you look at an existing package and find it hard to understand, that doesn't necessarily mean you haven't learned enough yet. Maybe it just *is* hard to understand because it was written to be useful, not to be educational. On Wed, 28 Sept 2022 at 04:13, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming < c...@teo-en-ming-corp.com> wrote: > Subject: How long does it take to learn the R programming language? > > Good day from Singapore, > > How long does it take to learn the R programming language? > > Is it easy? Is there a steep learning curve? > > Thank you. > > Regards, > > Mr. Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming > Targeted Individual in Singapore > Blogs: > https://tdtemcerts.blogspot.com > https://tdtemcerts.wordpress.com > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
