Roger D Peng with the Department of Biostatistics at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health presents on the use of R from tapply to Tidyverse! The intentional ambiguity of the R language, inherited from the S language, is one of its defining features. Is it an interactive system for data analysis or is it a sophisticated programming language for software developers? The ability of R to cater to users who do not see themselves as programmers, but then allow them to slide gradually into programming, is an enduring quality of the language and is what has allowed it to gain significance over time. As the R community has grown in size and diversity, R’s ability to match the needs of the community has similarly grown. However, this growth has raised interesting questions about R’s value proposition today and how new users to R should be introduced to the system. I will discuss some lessons learned from my experience teaching R to new users and from observing the evolution of the language over the past 20 years.
Main Sections
0:00 Introduction
6:48 What is S?
9:31 Existing packages
10:09 Key problems
12:05 R: A language for data analysis and graphics
18:38 R, Programming language
21:27 New Users
23:31 Tidyverse features
25:29 Tidyverse philosophy
28:04 Tidyverse design principle
29:13 Intentional ambiguity
30:27 As weakness, strength?
35:38 Selling R (2001 edition)
40:29 R close out
41:49 Questions
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