Paul,
I think your point "you need [to] spend at least a few hours a week on
it" is key. Since I am not doing statistics daily, more in fits & starts
as my latest project -may- require, my approach has been more task
oriented. A less-than-ideal approach. So, I think your suggestion is
on-the-mark.
Tom
Paul Hiemstra wrote:
Ivan Calandra wrote:
You are definitely right...
What to do with bad beginner's questions is not a simple issue.
If a "beginner's mailing list" is created, who will answer to such
questions? And moreover, the beginners won't take advantage of the
other questions (I've personally learned a lot trying to understand
the questions and answers to other's problems). And also, as you
said, the problems might persist.
The beginner's mailing list might be good in one aspect though: the
"experts" who subscribe to it would be willing to help the beginners
to get started with R, knowing that the questions might not be
clearly stated.
As you pointed out, the mailing list is not the best for basic stuff
(the question is of course "what is basic?"). Not everybody knows
some colleagues who work with R (I'm personally the 1st one to use R
in my lab).
I think, somehow and I have no idea how, documentation and guidance
to search for help should be more accessible as soon as you start
with R. Maybe a _*clear*_ section on the R homepage or in the
"introduction to R" manual like "where to find help", including all
of the most common and useful resources available (from "?" and
RSiteSearch() to R Wiki and Crantastic).
Hi Ivan (and list),
I think the main problem is not as much that there isn't structure in
the way R provides documentation / tutorials, but that people have a
hard time finding the structure. There are task views for certain
specific fields, but I think a lot of beginners do not know that they
exist. There are separate mailing lists for specific fields, but I
often see geographical (my field of expertise) oriented questions on
R-help that would fit much better on R-sig-geo.
So I think a "O my God, I've downloaded R and what now" tutorial might
be a good idea to put very close to the download button of R on CRAN.
This tutorial would focus not on how to do things in R, but would
provide guidance to the most obvious sources of information such as
Task views, specific mailing lists, ways to search list archives,
information for beginners how to write a good e-mail etc. I think for
a lot of beginners it is not as much the answer to a specific question
that they need, but more guidance how to look for answers themselves.
But at the end of the day, R is still not very easy to learn when
coming from GUI oriented stats programs. In addition, to become
reasonably fluent in R, you need spend at least a few hours a week on
it. SO I think we can ease the pain for beginners, but not take away
that it takes quite some time to become fluent in R.
cheers,
Paul
I hope that this whole discussion might help to make the R world better.
Thank you Patrick for initiating it!
Regards,
Ivan
Le 2/26/2010 15:09, Paul Hiemstra a écrit :
Ivan Calandra wrote:
Since you want input from beginners, here are some thoughts
I had and still have two big problems with R:
- this vectorization thing. I've read many manuals (including R
inferno), but I'm still not completely clear about it. In simple
examples, it's fine. But when it gets a bit more complex, then...
Related to it, the *apply functions are still a bit difficult to
understand. When I have to use them, I just try one and see what
happens. I don't understand them well enough to know which one I need.
- the second problem is where to find the functions/packages I
need. There are many options, and that's actually the problem. R
Wiki, Rseek, RSiteSearch, Crantastic, etc... When you start with R,
you discover that the capabilities of R are almost unlimited and
you don't really know where to start, where to find what you need.
As noted in earlier posts, the mailing list is really great, but
some people are really hard with beginners. It was noted in a
discussion a few days ago, but it looks like some don't realize how
difficult it is at the beginning to formulate a good question,
clear, with self-contained example and so on. Moreover, not
everybody speaks English natively. I don't mean that you must help,
even when the question is really vague and not clear and whatever.
I'm just saying that if you don't want to help (whatever the
reason), you don't have to say it badly. But in any cases, the
mailing list is still really helpful. As someone noted (sorry I
erased the email so I don't remember who), it might be a good idea
to split it.
Hi everyone,
My 2ct about the mailing list :). I understand that beginners have a
hard time formulating a good question. But the problem is that we
can't answer the question when it is unclear. So either I:
- Don't bother answering
- Try do discuss with the author of the question, taking lots of
time to find out what exactly is the question.
- Send a "read the posting guide" answer
I mostly do the first, as I have to get things done during my PhD
:). So this leaves us with kind of a problem, the person mailing the
list doesn't have the knowledge to ask the right question, the list
can't answer properly and consequently, the person mailing the list
still doesn't get the information he/she needs. We could start an
R-beginner mailing list, but this would also suffer from this
problem. What do you guys think?
Maybe the mailing list is not the right medium for really basic
stuff. For that I would recommend a good R-book or (better) a course
in R or (even better) some colleagues who work with R that you can
ask questions to.
cheers,
Paul
Hope that's what you wanted
Ivan
Le 2/26/2010 08:39, Dieter Menne a écrit :
Patrick Burns wrote:
* What were your biggest misconceptions or
stumbling blocks to getting up and running
with R?
(This derives partly from teaching)
The fact that this xapply-stuff was not idempotent (worse: not
always) and
that you need a monster like do.call() to straighten this out.
Nowadays,
plyr comes close.
The concept of environment. With S it was worse, though.
That you cannot change values "passed by reference". I noted that
the latter
is no problem for students who have not worked with c(++/#)
before. That
there is only one return-result in functions.
"[" and the likes as an operator.
10 years ago, when I started, the message was: S4 is the future,
S3 is
legacy. So I learned S4. Only to never use is in self-written code
later.
Might be different for BioConductor people.
That sometimes you can use vectors not in data= (lattice), and
sometimes not
(ggplot2). Still a VERY confusing inconsistency.
The "why-does-this-not-print" FAQ.
Why does par(oma..) not work with lattice?
Dieter
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