mabbles: The Missing Piece of a Unified Theory of Tidyness
R programming has seen a big shift in the last couple of years. All those packages that RStudio have been creating to solve this or that problem suddenly started to cohere into a larger ecosystem of...
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Introducing DohaR – A new R User Group in Doha, Qatar
I’m starting a new R User Group in Doha, Qatar. Our first meetup is on 26th May, at the HBKU Student Center in Education City. I’ll be talking about run-time testing with my assertive package, and...
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RL10N: Let R Speak Your Language
R has been translated into 20 languages but currently not many packages have translations. In a survey of CRAN done last December, of the 8274 packages on CRAN, only 50 had any installed translations....
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Big package update: assertive is now 16 packages; new pathological also on CRAN
One of the bits of feedback that I got from the useR conference was that my assertive package, for run-time testing of code, was too big. Since then I’ve been working to modularise it, and the results...
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Qatar R User Group
Microsoft have announced new funding for R User Groups (Python and Hadoop too), so now seems as good a time as any for me to stop procrastinating and set up a Qatar R User Group. If you live anywhere...
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R packages with unlimited licenses
I had an interesting email today saying that developers at the writer’s company wanted to use one of my packages, but weren’t allowed because it was under an unlimited license. I release quite a few of...
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New version of assertive and answers to tutorial exercises
I gave a tutorial at useR on testing R code, which turned out to be a great way of getting feedback on my code! Based on the suggestions by attendees, I’ve made a big update to the package, which is...
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The state of assertions in R
“Assertion” is computer-science jargon for a run-time check on your code. In R , this typically means function argument checks (“did they pass a numeric vector rather than a character vector into your...
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From cats to zombies, Wednesday at useR2015
The morning opened with someone who I was too bleary eyed to work out who it was. Possibly the dean of the University of Aalborg. Anyway, he said that this is the largest ever useR conference, and the...
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How I made every tech company that I may ever want to work for in the future...
It turns out that when people tell you things, you should listen. Like when Joe Rickert of Microsoft says “this is not news, please don’t repeat what I’m about to say”, you should maybe take note and...
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Everyone loves R markdown and Github; stories from the R Summit, day two
More excellent talks today! Andrie de Vries of Microsoft kicked off today’s talks with a demo of checkpoint. This is his package for assisting reproducibility by letting you install packages from a...
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The Workflow of Infinite Shame, and other stories from the R Summit
At day one of the R Summit at Copenhagen Business School there was a lot of talk about the performance of R, and alternate R interpreters. Luke Tierney of the University of Iowa, the author of the...
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Thoughts on R’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Documentation
A couple of days ago Pete Werner had a rant about the state of R’s documentation. A lot of it was misguided, but it had some legitimate complaints, and the fact that people can perceive R’s...
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Many package updates on CRAN
Over the last week or two I’ve been pushing all my packages to CRAN. pathological (for working with file paths), runittotestthat (for converting RUnit tests to testthat tests), and rebus (formerly...
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How do you get things into base-R?
A couple of months ago I spotted that the examples for the paste function weren’t very good, and actually, there were quite a few functions that new users of R are likely to encounter, that weren’t...
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Update on improving examples in base-R
Last month I was ranting about the state of some of the examples in base-R, particularly the paste function. Martin Maechler has now kindly taken my suggested examples and added them into R. Hopefully...
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Improving base-R examples
Earlier today I saw the hundred bazillionth question about how to use the paste function. My initial response was “take a look at example(paste) to see how it works”. Then I looked at example(paste),...
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Regular expressions for everyone else
Regular expressions are an amazing tool for working with character data, but they are also painful to read and write. Even after years of working with them, I struggle to remember the syntax for...
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Finally, a use for rapply
In the apply family of functions, rapply is the unloved ginger stepchild. While lapply, sapply and vapply make regular appearances in my code, and apply and tapply have occasional cameo appearances, in...
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Automatically convert RUnit tests to testthat tests
There’s a new version of my assertive package, for sanity-checking code, on its way to CRAN. The release has been delayed a while, since my previous attempt at an upload met with an error that was only...
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