1.4 Why R is like a relationship…
Yes, R is very much like a relationship. Like relationships, there are two major truths to R programming:
Figure 1.2: Yep, R will become both your best friend and your worst nightmare. The bad times will make the good times oh so much sweeter.
There is nothing more frustrating than when your code does not work
There is nothing more satisfying than when your code does work!
Anything worth doing, from losing weight to getting a degree, takes time. Learning R is no different. Especially if this is your first experience programming, you are going to experience a lot of headaches when you get started. You will run into error after error and pound your fists against the table screaming: “WHY ISN’T MY CODE WORKING?!?!? There must be something wrong with this stupid software!!!” You will spend hours trying to find a bug in your code, only to find that - frustratingly enough, you had had an extra space or missed a comma somewhere. You’ll then wonder why you ever decided to learn R when (::sigh::) SPSS was so “nice and easy.”
Figure 1.3: When you first meet R, it will look so fugly that you’ll wonder if this is all some kind of sick joke. But trust me, once you learn how to talk to it, and clean it up a bit, all your friends will be crazy jealous.
Fun Fact! SPSS stands for “Shitty Piece of Shitty Shit”. True story.
This is perfectly normal! Don’t get discouraged and DON’T GO BACK TO SPSS! That would be quitting on exercise altogether because you had a tough workout.
Trust me, as you gain more programming experience, you’ll experience fewer and fewer bugs (though they’ll never go away completely). Once you get over the initial barriers, you’ll find yourself conducting analyses much, much faster than you ever did before.