I hired an undergrad student this summer who only knows R. I don't use it much and have such a hard time with R syntax. In terms of cost benefit to me, it is really pushing the edge.

@StrongBad Really? I love R and find it very powerful, personally. I also love that there is a great library of packages, and unlike typical MATLAB library-type things, they often come with publications that give all the details of what they are and how they work.

@ff524 I too, like @StrongBad , find the syntax of R quite distant from my tastes. I tried it twice, then I gave up.

@MassimoOrtolano What do you like? matlab?

@ff524 I think if I used it more, it would be fine. I used to struggle with white space in Python, but I have gotten over that.

I cannot say I really like it, but I find matlab's syntax more easy going. The price to pay is that matlab's plots need to be refined a lot before publishing. For plots, I generally use Asymptote or matlab2tikz.

I also use Mathematica, but I'd be lost without Mathematica.SE...

@MassimoOrtolano I really like being able to use the same script for basic data wrangling to serious statistics to publication-ready visualizations. I even use it to make animations.

e.g. I made this in R: gfycat.com/TerribleBrightIrishterrier#?frameNum=0

Cool! The issue for me is that even if I chose to switch to R, I'd be the only one of my group. Changing the habits of one person is hard enough, but that of an entire group, especially when there are people who are not particularly programming-oriented is almost impossible. I'm too old to undertake such a task! ;-)

@ff524 you are young and that is what you grew up with. Publication ready visualizations used to require an India ink, stencils, and a capable illustrator.

I only stopped using |stat and PLT about 5 years ago. Such great programs.

@StrongBad I don't know about that. Most of the kids I get in here expect to produce all of their visualizations in Excel.

The first time I used Matlab it was during my Master's thesis and it run on a VAX server at the university. The VAX center would then bill the group for the usage.

@ff524 Excel produces some truly awful figures and is just awful for about anything that scientists need to do.

@StrongBad I wholeheartedly agree.

@ff524 and @StrongBad about Excel: lemire.me/blog/2014/05/23/…

@MassimoOrtolano My only experience with a VAX was as a grad student at MIT where I had to program stuff in Scheme. I will take R over Scheme anyday.

@MassimoOrtolano @StrongBad When my mom did her PhD, she just hired a statistician to do all the data analysis and create the figures :)

@StrongBad I recall Scheme! I didn't use it directly, but I recall my friends studying CS at the time (around 1989-1992) using it... with a lot of swearing!

@ff524 Your mom was very smart.

@StrongBad It was a different time...

@ff524 How many times your mother recalls you that those were times? :-) Every time I meet a student who as a parent engineer, they all complain that this parent continuously remind them that nowadays it's too easy :-D

@MassimoOrtolano I could never really grasp the car and the cdr and the cadr and the caar. It is giving me flashbacks.

@MassimoOrtolano I actually agree with her on how much easier I have it. She wrote the thesis on a typewriter... she looked up papers on actual paper and microfilm and stuff like that... not to mention that she had six kids by the time she finished her PhD, and I have zero :)

Her PhD is in psychology, not engineering.

@ff524 I, too, look up papers on actual papers ;-) When I wrote my Master's thesis there was LaTeX 2.09 and including pictures was a nightmare: since I was in hurry, I printed them, cut them and glued on the pages which I then photocopied.

@StrongBad Probably Scheme is one of those experimenta languages now forgotten like Modula-2...

Anyway, in the office I share with a colleague of mine of another institute with whom I collaborate, we have a mythical PDP-11. Next time I go there, I'll post a picture of this piece of hystory. In the office, we have also a Lemon computer, a do-it-yourself wannabe Apple II. We don't lack of memorabilia in that office...

@MassimoOrtolano MIT switch from Scheme to Python about 7 years ago. I think we still have a PDP-11 down the hall. Luckily I never had to deal with that or punch cards.

@StrongBad Luckily, I've never had to deal with punch cards too, those I know who used them said that they were really a nightmare when there was a bug. One day or another I'll turn that PDP-11 on again :-)

Time to sleep for me, thank you everybody for the chat!