Stop staying you can't put R in prod.  

I made a blog post with my thoughts and reactions.

#rstats #rust #putRinprod

https://josiahparry.com/posts/2023-07-06-r-is-still-fast.html

Josiah Parry - R is still fast: a salty reaction to a salty blog post

@josiah How about maintainability?

Never met a developer who liked R, and to put things into production, you have to work with devs.
The new people coming into data science all know python. Even among older data scientists, you rarely find one that prefers R (unless they're a statistician working in academia).

Who is going to maintain that code after the person who wrote it leaves for another company?

@orizuru show them quarto, they will love R for generating static websites https://r4ds.hadley.nz/quarto-formats.html#websites-and-books
R for Data Science (2e) - 30  Quarto formats

@jrosell quarto also supports python. So it's a hard sell.

The thing R has got going for it is the plots, they are pretty.
I'm sorry, but the rest just lags behind, from the syntax to the ecosystem (except very specific stats packages).

Just having array indexes starting at 1 will make a Dev's skin crawl.

@orizuru @jrosell funny how many ideas that started in our dead language in just the last 5 years keep getting ported to these mainstream ones.

@milesmcbain @jrosell never said there have not been any ideas that started in R, or that there are no specific fields that use R (specially in academia).
But if you talk with data scientists working in most companies, it's very rare to see R used in production (and when you do see it, it's usually legacy code).

EDIT: and by production, I don't mean some one-off analysis that you made for a client, I mean something that's handling requests on a kubernetes cluster.

@orizuru @milesmcbain "production" can algo mean code that generates html files that are latter served on kubernetes cluster

@jrosell @milesmcbain

Well, in those cases, R is not really doing any live computation or handling requests. You only use it to generate HTML files, and those are the ones that are in the production server.

The blogpost was about having R being used to handle requests in a production server.

EDIT: I'm not saying that a setup with R doing these things is impossible, but it's rare, which means finding people to maintain it is hard. This has to be a main consideration when putting in prod

@orizuru @jrosell I think you’re probably right in that using R for the back-end of high load online ML systems is rare. But I’d also argue that businesses where those kinds of systems are viable are also quite rare when you consider the universe of businesses that are trying to derive value from data.

The definition of ‘production’ being used in the original blog post and this conversation is quite narrow.

@orizuru @jrosell like there would be many fold more businesses where nightly batch runs for preds / recs / ranks which are then fed into a database and distributed from there to front end apps via standard queries would be more than sufficient.
@orizuru @jrosell and many more again where periodic batch data wrangling can provide the source materials for more bespoke data analysis aimed at addressing specific businesses questions. This is more strategic level stuff that never touches an end user.