Let’s call it tidysearch

R became 25 years old last year, and yet it’s only in relatively recent years that the language has really taken off with numerous conferences every year driven by a passionate and vibrant community of users. A large part of this has been driven by an ecosystem of R packages called the Tidyverse, which many new users nowadays begin their R journey with.

This alternative ‘opinionated’ set of packages has been adopted now as canon by many users (including me) and the wave of hype and success associated with it has caused many experienced R users, well versed in long established ‘Base R’ functions, to take the leap into a new way of coding and a whole new set of functions.

However, some of us who began with the tidyverse do not have the experience to be able to choose an appropriate base R function when the tidyverse is not available or not appropriate for the problem at hand (e.g. lack of internet access, developing a package with minimal dependencies).

Therefore, I’ve created a simple search tool using the DT package – let’s call it tidysearch – for base R users to search for an appropriate tidyverse function, and for tidyverse users to be able to search for a base R function. You can find it on the navigation bar above.

I’m hoping this will eventually become an exhaustive and definitive resource showing the overlap between the two ecosystems of packages. Please contribute if you can!