Having used Python, JSL, Julia, R and Matlab; I agree with most of the things in R. R is an extremely ugly language. It seems to be created by people who wear capris and uggs (both at the same time). But, R has incredible packages, especially the work done by Hadley Wickam. ggplot2 is beautiful. It is utterly gorgeous. It is what Ted Baker is to the capri guys that designed the language itself.
My personal hack to deal with the unbearable ugliness of R is to use Rpy2 and call R packages from Python --- at least writing some boilerplate code in Python makes me happier than having to write in R.
ggplot2 produces beautiful graphs. I don't think it's beautiful as a package -- the syntax is strange and reflects an earlier evolution of the ideas that went into the tidyverse.
Notably the use of + instead of chaining operators, the use of a custom "ggproto" object system instead of S3 (which makes extensibility a nightmare), and the superfluous presence of the aes() function (rendered unnecessary by better lazy evaluation tricks not really well-explored at the time).
> the superfluous presence of the aes() function (rendered unnecessary by better lazy evaluation tricks not really well-explored at the time)
I find this statement interesting - the aes() function helped distinguish attributes that were bound to values as opposed to being bound to constants. What would you propose as an alternative if the aes() function were eliminated?
EDIT:
Looking at ggviz [1], the presumptive successor to ggplot2, it seems that two new syntactic features will be used to distinguish constant vs. bound data.
I seem to be in the extreme minority opinion that ggplot2 has facilitated the creation of millions of ugly charts. The default theming hurts my eyes. Much improvement can come from just adding + theme_bw() or + theme_minimal() as the last layer.
But it is flexible, and it's fun. I have enjoyed following other's examples of recreating chart themes mimicked from the Economist and FiveThirtyEight. I think the latter often does employ ggplot2 with heavy customization to create some nice looking visualizations.
If you don't like that syntax use another library. But ggplot2 how you code graphic like that is amazing for me and many other people. I've tried SAS and Matlab and ggplot2 is the best.
