R & Bengali

Coding in SQL: How R feels like my native language

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Around 10% of Indians are trilingual. In most cases, it is English, Hindi and the native language. I belong to this category. My native language is Bengali. And it is not only my native language but also my first language.

I grew up in a household where 99.99% of conversations were in Bengali. Not only that, my medium of study was also Bengali until I joined college.

In college, the official medium was English. I didn’t have any problem writing papers or reading books. Some terms were different, for example, “Jaddo” (জাড্য) became inertia and so on. However, I was already familiar with most of these terminologies because I had studied most of them in higher secondary.

The part where I faced some challenges was speaking. I was forming correct sentences (because I knew the grammar, parts of speech etc.) but often they would be very slow. I figured out why this was happening. It was because I was converting Bengali to English in my mind before speaking.

So, I figured there are two ways I can improve: either I have to make these translations instantly or I have to start thinking in English. The second one seemed like a more reasonable path. During the same time, I got into Beatles and Rock music so my transition was rather easy. Over the last 9 years (I started college in 2014), English has become the “2nd 1st language” for me. Due to heavy usage, I often think in English too.

This is something I realise is happening with programming languages too.

I have mostly coded in R. Even to fetch data, in my previous organisation, we used to write very complex SQL queries in an R wrapper. SQL queries themselves have very long and rigid structures, so scripting languages like R (or even Python) make life easier.

But this is not the case in my current organisation.

Here, I need to look at SQL queries written by others. Sometimes debug them. Often make changes to pull different data. So far, on many occasions, I took help from Chat GPT and converted the query to an R code. Then debugged, and made changes.

Even when I have to do some data wrangling, I start thinking in terms of R functions, then google the equivalent Python code for that and proceed if I am writing a Python script for the same. R has basically become my Bengali. The good thing is, that the syntax and code flow for R (base) and Python are not very different, but SQL is a different sport altogether.

The challenge here is a bit different. The Beatles have never written an SQL query.

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