DOC: Flesh out the R comparison section of docs

[hayd]

I guess quite a lot of people come from an R background, and perhaps a good material would be a conversion table for pandas vs R functions/idioms etc. in http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/dev/comparison_with_r.html

Perhaps this site could offer some functions to consider including:
http://www.statmethods.net/management/variables.html

[jreback]

I guess R is famous for obfuscation (of syntax)?

[hayd]

I suspect it'll be a many-to-one table :)

[cpcloud]

ha! u guys are funny. what the heck is attach? is like attach(x) == globals()['x'] = x?

[jreback]

isn't R intuitive?

[cpcloud]

where the heck are cyl and vs coming from? This

attach(mtcars)
aggdata <- aggregate(mtcars, by=list(cyl,vs), FUN=mean, na.rm=TRUE)
detach(mtcars)

works only if you do the attach(mtcars)? wtf are the scoping rules in R? no such thing exists in Python without a lot of magic...

[jtratner]

Attach basically is like saying 'make all of the columns of the data frame global variables'

[jtratner]

It has a companion method detach. I think there's also a with - like statement that scopes just to the function call. Have you seen the model syntax yet? a ~ b I totally get that it's useful, but it's a little unsettling when you are used to being able to explicitly trace all names in the document.

[cpcloud]

patsy + statsmodels + pandas >>>>> R

[cpcloud]

magic regarding scope and namespaces 👎

[cpcloud]

anyway comparisons are useful to show people how awesome pandas is :)

[hayd]

related http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17621325/equivalent-pandas-function-to-this-r-aggregation

Anyone fancy spamming the pandas/R/.. mailing lists to see if anyone is interested in doing this?

[hayd]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18005305/implementing-r-scale-function-in-pandas-in-python