this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
1205 points (98.3% liked)

Asklemmy

43818 readers
1399 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I think most all of us here on Lemmy are people with technical background. Most of my professional contacts remained using Reddit, Twitter and even excited when Threads launched.

If you are non-tech background, please comment and share what you do for life.

If you have tech background, upvote this to help promote this post so that we can find more non-tech users on Lemmy.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It really is. Even for data analysis there are (apparently and hopefully) much better programs/languages (not sure what term would be correct here). I was actually assigned to an institude for computational biology to help me with the coding for my Master's thesis but the people DID NOT USE R so they didn't provide any help anyway. And I had to use R. They mostly used mathlab. Later, when I started working, Graphpad Prism absolutely did the job necessary. Most of the "coding" I used R for could have honestly just be done in Excel.

But the worst part of it is making it through and it completely doesn't matter. Like, people who actually code for a living don't care in the slightest about R. Just because I now have fought my way through it doesn't mean it is anywhere useful to learn C or PHP or whatever, mostly because the field of use is so narrow and specific and not one of those "universal" languages (for lack of a better term) that you actually can build software and websites and apps with. I cannot code anything "for fun" even if I wanted to. I remember there was something HTML something in R, but come on. (Also I forgot what HTML is.) This is not what it is used for and it gives me nothing. While my spouse, who is a software developer with the patience of a saint when it comes to my stupid questions, used his knowledge of python to learn Rust and then play around with C and now Go and even go to a conference about Go and actually understand whats going on there. There seem to be much more crosslinks and transferring going on and also a similar usefulness.

Please excuse the R-rant/R-rage, I am really frustrated about it because I went in with the best intentions and I wasted a year on this bullshit and it doesn't even make my CV look good.