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Ataru074 t1_iy7xav8 wrote

That isn’t how science works.

Is it useful to learn how to program these? Well, yes if you truly want to understand the mechanics of something and it’s limitations. In a way to understand that you should use a language as close to the bare metal as possible, such as C or Assembly.

In the same way it’s important to be able to work the math is you truly want to understand it.

But, at certain point you have to either become a researcher in “that” field, or trust the work of other researchers and move on.

I’m not saying you should blindly apply mathematical models to your data, you should at least know enough to know if the model is correct for your application, if you are covering the bases in terms of assumptions and so on…

Look at R itself, if you are using R for this job. When you install new packages the first thing that R does is check the dependencies and install the dependencies first, which might rely on other dependencies. Because nobody would be a fool enough to reprogram the whole thing from scratch.

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