R U Experienced?

As mentioned in the past blog, R and U (as well as many other letters in the English alphabet) are programming languages.

In my current work environment, our primary programming software is a pretty nifty composition and layout tool which is customizable through a C++ based scripting capability. The scripting is often utilized to create sample pieces or to compensate for data which- for whatever reason- does not perform as expected.

Like most things, the best way to learn something is to do/use it. In my role- working at night- there is some opportunity for programming, but for reasons which should be obvious, not a great deal. As a consequence, I do a small amount of programming (actually creating jobs), a lot of quality control, and some break-fix. I've acquired a great deal of QC experience over the years, and have gotten quite good at it. My programming skills- in this particular environment- are below many, but not all, of my peers. I'm not bad at break-fix, and rather enjoy this particular aspect of my position, because it involves both the "hard" skill of actually working with a program and coming up with a solution, as well as the "soft" skills of interfacing with imaging techs, press personnel and/or supervisors and becoming an integral element of keeping a project on time. And, in direct mail, time is an element which cannot ever be ignored. Our clients spend time and resources on creating campaigns that will execute within a certain timeframe. In military terms, we and the client combined are like artillery: we're most effective when we're on time and on target!

I've mentioned my peers here once or twice, and like most industries, not everyone arrives at their current position via a straight path. Some actually studied programming in school and have a degree in it. Others worked in some capacity in either direct mail or printing, and made their way into programming. One of our programmers started out as a minor league (professional) baseball player who had a degree in graphic arts and came to us via the prepress department. My background is sales, databases and spreadsheets. Go figure.

But... as I don't have a programming background, I thought it would be expeditious to beef up my programming skills. I had initially poked around in Python- and will get back to that- but right now I am trying my hand at R. And yes, for those uninitiated, R is indeed a programming language. R has been around for awhile, and was developed out of S. In any event, this is a mountain for me, for a number of reasons.

For starters, R is designed with statistical computing in mind. Statistical computing is the bailiwick of the likes of my good e-buddy Prof. Dr. Diego Kuonen, not a former math-as-a-last-resort sort of person such as I used to be. On top of that, I've NEVER had a stats course at any level, and do not regularly use it. And, my job has absolutely nothing to do with stats.

Still, I took it up as a challenge. Languages one does not regularly speak, read or write are not called foreign without reason. And here's where it gets interesting: I've got a metric ****-ton of experience with foreign languages. I speak English natively, but have studied at least four Slavic languages, two Romance languages and one other Germanic language. One of the languages needed the learning of a new alphabet.  So, why not a computer language?

I've found, as I look at languages, that the more one studies, the closer one looks, and starts to see similarities and patterns that may have been seen before ... and so, I find myself looking at R.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.