Garrett Grolemund is an O’Reilly author and teaches classes on data analysis for R Studios.
We sat down to discuss why data scientists, statisticians, and programmers alike can use the R language to make data analysis easier and more powerful.
Key points from the full video (below) interview include:
- R is a free, open-source language that has its roots in S-PLUS [Discussed at the 0:27 mark]
- What does it mean for R to be a programming language versus just a data analysis tool? [Discussed at the 1:00 mark]
- R comes with many useful data analysis methods already implemented, so you don’t have to start from scratch. [Discussed at the 4:23 mark]
- R is a mix of functional and object-oriented programming that is optimal for handling data structures that data analysts expect (e.g. vectors) [Discussed at the 6:08 mark]
- A discussion of using R in conjunction with other languages like Python, along with packages that help with this [Discussed at the 7:30 mark]
- Getting started using R isn’t really any harder than using a calculator [Discussed at the 9:28 mark]
You can view the entire interview in the following video.
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