R’s plot function, the 1970′s retro look is not cool any more

Casual users of a system want to learn a few simple rules that enable them to get most things done. Many languages have a design principle of only providing one way of doing things. Members of one language family are known for providing umpteen different ways of doing something and R is no exception.

R comes with the plot function as part of the base system. I am an admirer of plot‘s ability to take whatever is thrown at it and generally produce a workman-like graphical image; workman-like is a kinder description than 1970′s retro look.

R has a thriving library of add-on packages and the package ggplot2 is a byword for fancy graphics in the R community. Anybody reading the description of the qplot function, in this package, would think it is the death kneel for plot. They would be wrong, qplot contains a fatal flaw, it does a very poor job of handling the simple stuff (often generating weird error messages in the process).

In the beginning I’m sure Hadley Wickham, the design+implementor of ggplot/ggplot2, was more concerned with getting his ideas implemented and was not looking to produce a replacement for plot. Unfortunately it looks as-if the vision for functions in the ggplot package is as high-end plot replacements (i.e., for power users) and not as universal plot replacements (i.e., support for casual users).

This leaves me pulling my hair out trying to produce beautiful looking graphs for a book I am working on. The readership are likely to be casual users of R and I am trying to recommend one way of doing something for every task. The source code+data of all the examples will be freely available and I’m eating my own dog food, so its plot I have to use.