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0 pointsepistasis1d ago0 comments

This is definitely one of the better Python plotting libraries out there, but no matter which one I use, they make me yearn for R.

The R language is just so much more beautiful than Python, in its full lispy goodness, with lazy evaluation.

It doesn't matter quite as much now that I have LLMs write a good chunk of the plotting code. But the LLM python plotting code is easily 5x-10x as many lines as a hand-crafted R plot, making it slower and harder to grok than R.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

TrackerFF1d ago· 2 in thread

This is going to sound superficial as hell, some things are just horrendously ugly in R. Like the various pipe operators. %>% might just be the ugliest I've ever seen, in any language (and, yes, I know why you need % %).

epistasisOP1d ago

I guess my concept of beauty has more to do with the structure of the code, how easy it is to extend the current code to something else, the signal-to-noise ratio, etc.

The visual impact of a %>% or a |> or whatever fades within a few minutes of reading code for me, what I'm looking at for beauty relates more to the AST structure. Lack of repetition, ease of understanding the data flow, ability to adapt the data flow, etc. that's what makes code beautiful to me.

levocardia1d ago

|> works too

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