maurolepore
commented
6 years ago I like your idea. In crafting the writting, Would you consider ideas from behavioral psycology? That is not my field but I find it fascinating and potentially useful.
What most quickly comes to my mind are ideas from the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by the Heath brothers. The book presents a model to facilitate change that can be summarized in this image:
Examples:
- Direct the rider: Provide convincing evidence for why to change.
- Motivate the elephant: Make people feel they need to change.
- Shape the path: Provide systems, workflows, convensions that facilitate change.
Another idea that comes to my mind is about how to influence people. Here I'm inspired by How to win friends and influence people, by Dale Carnegie, and a bunch of other books (audible books including free-link). I think the most influential way to drive change is by asking questions and listening.
I suggest creating a friendly forum, maybe a meetup, where "speakers" of different programming languagges solve the same problem. This should enrich everyone's hearts and minds, including R users.
Rstudio is looking for Director of Education who can help with this project. https://hire.withgoogle.com/public/jobs/rstudiocom/view/P_AAAAAACAAADJv_c3liAM2t
How can we ensure that uptake of R is not limited by misconceptions like “R isn’t a real programming language” or “R can’t be used in production”?
But, why don't we, as a community of R users, work on a doc or blog post where the data scientists talk about their experience of using R for a lot of things than just statistics that can help remove this kind of a stigma that is being told to young and aspiring data scientists like me. In all honesty, when I started learning data science, the instructors were pretty harsh in their view about R without even knowing it's full capabilities.
Why can't we collaborate with an open-source business like RStudio and work with to help promote R for higher level programming?