"Why do we use R rather than Excel?"

The first lesson of R is always the same. Read a CSV, manipulate it a bit, draw a graph. We did it all without much fuss - and a graph appeared on screen. Nifty!

To a programmer, it seems obvious - but it's a fair question! If you have a static set of data, you can drag your mouse over it, hit a few buttons, and a graph appears. Much easier than wrestling with esoteric syntax in a text-based interface. This isn't a Koan - where the student becomes enlightened at the end. It's a tricky question to answer. Here are the reasons I gave - feel free to add your own.

How do you see the code inside an Excel document? How do you tell exactly what is going on? You have to go clicking through cells, or reverse engineer what settings a graph has.

With something like R, you automatically have all the code visible in front of you. Reading through the code in a linear fashion is possible. You can trace exactly what the code is doing without having to worry about whether there's some code hidden in cell Z44.

Related to the above, it's hard to visualise what changes have been made to an Excel document. I don't know any way to easily see how a formula has changed. With R and Git (or any other version control system) you can see exactly what has changed from one version to the next.

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