Larry got a job with a pharmaceutical company the day after he graduated and has been with them through two mergers and an acquisition. He refers to company officers by their first names, and is always happy to explain what they’re doing wrong. He was offered the chance to go to rstudio::conf last year, but gave the spot to one of his younger colleagues because “they’d probably enjoy it more”.
Larry has been using SAS for 25 years and regards it as a perfectly fine tool, thank you very much.
Larry has never used R, but has decades of experience with statistics, messy data, and reporting. He prefers very structured learning environments and clear objectives, and his most common question, “How would I…” followed by a summary of something he has been doing for years in SAS.
Larry is a reluctant learner: he recognizes that he has to learn R now that management has decided to adopt Shiny for all its reporting tools, but with just eight years to go until early retirement, the thought makes him weary. He is very uncomfortable with anything outside his normal working environment: he needs to see how to use an IDE step by step (preferably in a one-on-one tutorial) to get over his paralysis.
Larry finds tutorials long-winded (“Just show me what function I need to call!”) or confusing (“Why would they do it that way?”). Cheatsheets showing him how to map his understanding of SAS to equivalent code in R would be his preferred starting point.