Why R is Good

I’ve tried to keep the actual material in this course focussed on actually teaching R. Here, I’ll make a brief attempt at evangelizing for R, and outline why I think it’s better than other stats-focussed tools like SPSS and Stata.

R is a Language

R is not just a program that you issue commands to - it’s a language with consistent rules you can learn, and all the tools in R are written using that language and those rules4. That means:

  • Every tool and function you use is built out of the same basic components.
  • You can write tools and functions that are just as capable and flexible as the built-in tools.
  • If you need to, you can “open up” other people’s tools and change, modify or improve them.

R is a programming language

As well as being a language, R is specifically a programming language, and has some of the standard features of programming languages that allow them to be flexible, and to “abstract away” the low-level details of tasks so you
can concentrate on the bigger picture.

Every part of your data in R is available as an R object, and you can access, modify and change it the same way as any other data. For example, you can get the column names of your data set as a character vector, which then works the same way as a text column in your actual data. Then you can:

  • Use some code to select a subset of your columns (without typing them all out manually)
  • Write code that will automatically apply the same recoding step to each of those columns (by “looping” or “iterating”) over them.
  • Write a function that can carry out these same steps on a brand new dataset with completely different column names.

R has an active community

There’s a huge wealth of information about R available on the internet, thanks to the fact that people are constantly working on it, discussing it, and making their work public. That means getting help with R is often much easier than in other languages, where it seems like the same 4 academics have been (condescendingly) answering questions for years.

  1. The exception to this is that the most basic components of R, like addition of numbers, are written in C for speed. These are usually the components that are so “low-level” that you don’t need to modify them.↩︎