[HN Gopher] Emacs Speaks Statistics
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Emacs Speaks Statistics
Author : smartmic
Score : 86 points
Date : 2024-09-21 18:20 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ess.r-project.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ess.r-project.org)
| macleginn wrote:
| My colleagues and I have been discussing recently if we should
| use Positron IDE as a common environment for teaching R and
| Python. Emacs is another option, of course.
| setopt wrote:
| I love Emacs, but I think it would be challenging to teach an
| intro programming course using it these days. (We landed on
| VSCode for teaching Python.)
| nextos wrote:
| The basics of Emacs are not that hard. One of my introductory
| freshman courses taught us XEmacs in parallel, as we went
| through Lex & Yacc.
|
| Basically you need to learn a few basic movements, which are
| also really useful on any terminal thanks to GNU Readline,
| and a some basic concepts like the minibuffer, interactive
| commands, etc. From there onward, things are quite easy to
| discover little by little, especially with newer packages
| like vertico, marginalia or which-key.
|
| Obviously, its much harder than VSCode, but investing on
| Emacs is IMHO worth the effort if one values stability. It
| will be probably still relevant when most competing solutions
| are gone. Plus, it offers great support for lots of niche
| languages and workflows, like Org.
| dlachausse wrote:
| > Basically you need to learn a few basic movements, which
| are also really useful on any terminal thanks to GNU
| Readline
|
| This is one of the biggest reasons why I'm slowly switching
| to Emacs for most of my editing needs. Those movement
| keyboard shortcuts are ubiquitous on UNIX family operating
| systems. They even work in most native text editing fields
| in macOS and iOS.
| nextos wrote:
| I agree, having a subset of Emacs/Readline keybindings
| available everywhere on macOS is really convenient and
| made Emacs quite natural to use for me.
|
| GNOME used to have an Emacs GTK key theme, but it is no
| longer available as of GTK 4.0?
| setopt wrote:
| > They even work in most native text editing fields in
| macOS and iOS.
|
| Some of them work, e.g. C-a/C-e, which is nice. However,
| after hearing about that "Readline keybindings work
| everywhere in MacOS", I was quite disappointed when I
| finally bought a Mac and the more useful Emacs/Readline
| bindings like M-f/M-b/M-d were all missing. I'm still
| happy with my Mac overall, but I wish they went further
| in this regard.
| dlachausse wrote:
| I think that's because the Meta key is the Option key on
| Macs which conflicts with some traditional keyboard
| shortcuts for other things in the OS.
| spudlyo wrote:
| There are conflicting systems in macOS at play here as a
| result of choosing the "Option" key as your "Meta" key.
| The basics of the Cocoa Emacs Keybindings
| (DefaultKeyBinding.dict) do allow for M-f/M-b/M-d to work
| as us Emacs users expect, however there is a conflict
| with the default US Keyboard Layout, which hijack these
| useful Option key sequences to allow for the easy input
| of letters with various diacritic markings. If you want
| to undo this, you can use a Keyboard Layout Editor like
| Ukelele[0] to make a custom layout that allows these key
| sequences to arrive unmolested at the Cocoa input system.
|
| [0]: https://software.sil.org/ukelele/
| TheGrassyKnoll wrote:
| Lol. Geez, we gotta do something about key sequences
| getting 'molested'...
| koito17 wrote:
| For M-b and M-f, the equivalents are M-<left> and
| M-<right>
| faizshah wrote:
| I think it depends on how new your students are to programming.
| If they are already coding and have their favorite IDE then it
| would be nice to force them to try something new to see a
| different workflow (even if they end up going back to vscode
| later).
|
| On the other hand for newer programmers you want to focus less
| on the tools, installation and workflow and more on just
| getting them programming. In that situation the batteries
| included environments like RStudio would be preferred.
|
| Another practical thing to think about is how much you and your
| TAs want to wrestle with installation issues vs just giving
| them a web based notebook environment like Colab.
| fuckyah wrote:
| VS Code + R extension is pretty good.
| bachmeier wrote:
| This semester is my first using Posit Cloud. It removes the
| headache whether you're teaching R or Python. The only thing
| I've found annoying is the need for students to install their
| own packages.
|
| I ran my own RStudio Server on Digital Ocean for years. That
| worked very well, with students not needing to install
| packages, but maintaining things myself created more work for
| me.
|
| Before that I had to deal with an unending string of support
| for the students using their own computers. I would never go
| back to that again.
|
| I used Cocalc once during the pandemic. It has a great set of
| features, but the students found the interface confusing.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > support for the students using their own computers.
|
| painful but thats how you teach people to fish instead of
| being consumers.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > thats how you teach people to fish
|
| If you're teaching a cooking class, you're wasting valuable
| time teaching people how to fish. But that wasn't really my
| point. A lot of the wasted time was mine.
| stackghost wrote:
| I'm in an MBA program and in my data science course (aimed at
| non programmers obviously) the prof used R and Rstudio.
|
| At first I thought it was a bad choice, and I did all my
| assignments with Emacs/ESS. I preferred it, as I do almost all
| my coding in emacs and of course it's easy to define custom
| shortcuts to insert the un-ergonomic R operators like the
| magrittr pipe. But I came to realize that the way Rstudio is
| self-contained, and oriented around "sessions", or notebook-
| style code, makes it easier for neophytes to pick up.
|
| I can't imagine how difficult it would be to teach a bunch of
| non programmers how to deal with python given the insane
| situation with venvs, pip vs homebrew, and 2 vs 3, imports,
| etc. 80% of my cohort are the type of people who think using
| the terminal constitutes "hacking" in the CrashOverride sense.
| darby_nine wrote:
| > 2 vs 3
|
| Is this really still relevant? I've been using only python3
| for well over a decade now and I can't remember the last time
| anyone even suggested I use python2. the rest of your
| critiques ring true though.
| stackghost wrote:
| Maybe you're right and it's not, but Python is definitely a
| Rube Goldberg machine of tutorials, libraries, and people
| who will tell you with a straight face that it's reasonable
| and expected to have 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12 installed
| alongside each other because reasons.
|
| I say this as someone who writes a fair amount of python
| and whose package manager decided to install 3.10, 3.11,
| and 3.12 as dependencies.
|
| Anyway, try explaining that to a bunch of business school
| people who are accustomed to just doing everything in the
| latest version of Excel, whatever that happens to be.
| macleginn wrote:
| They will soon have a convenient starting point:
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/introduction-
| to-p...
| worik wrote:
| ...OMG. Getting worse
| worik wrote:
| > try explaining that to a bunch of business school
| people
|
| Never mind them! I have been programming for decades and
| have been defeated twice by Python and its disrespect for
| semantic versioning
|
| Those version 3s often introduce breaking changes.
|
| I continue to be amazed and astounded that it is so
| popular. A poster child for "do not choose software based
| principally on popularity". Being unpopular is a
| handicap, but being popular - just look at Python. The
| Python ecosystem is a *nightmare*
| macleginn wrote:
| For Python, we settled on using Jupyter notebooks for the
| first semester to teach the language itself, while gradually
| introducing all the paraphernalia.
|
| This is of course introduces another problem of 'two
| cultures': Python people using Jupyter and the R community
| largely preferring Markdown.
| ekianjo wrote:
| positron is nice but still very much in alpha stages. may be
| better to wait for a year or so
| nomilk wrote:
| > many statistics packages provide only weak text editor
| functionality
|
| RStudio IDE with vim keybindings gives an extremely nice
| developer experience when working with R. There are only a few
| minor imperfections [1, 2, 3]. I'd still rate it a 9.5/10 dev
| experience.
|
| I've recently been experimenting with R + neovim + vim-slime.
| It's not perfect but also a very nice experience. It enables
| interactive use of R but with the full power of neovim.
|
| [1] control + 1 and control + 2 to switch between editor and
| console (pressing them in a hurry requires finger gymnastics)
|
| [2] while vim keybindings work in the script pane, they don't
| work in the console
|
| [3] about once per day for reasons I can't explain, RStudio's vim
| keybindings don't do what they should do (e.g. a key press is
| ignored)
| lottin wrote:
| The only feature I miss in ESS is the ability to save plots using
| a GUI. Saving plots from the CLI can be a little cumbersome.
| napoleongl wrote:
| In what way is R less powerful when used through Rstudio than
| through the terminal?
| pama wrote:
| Personally I enjoy ess in Emacs because it is easy to search
| and mix code from multiple locations/buffers in addition to
| having separate sessions, and I love the interactive mixing of
| shell, python and R in one place, the ease to include code
| snippets into documents, and so on. I imagine the excellent
| documentation and visualization options exist in R studio but
| its hard to replicate the full Emacs experience.
| clircle wrote:
| A great package that I use on a daily basis. I feel the dev team
| have some issues with scope of work and tech debt, but I still
| find ESS to the comfy-zone for R
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