I have a new short writeup, showing common R design patterns, implemented side-by-side in base-R and Tidy.

As readers of this blog know, I strongly believe that Tidy is a poor tool for teaching R learners who have no coding background. Relative to learning in a base-R environment, learners using Tidy take longer to become proficient, and once proficient, find that they are only equipped to work in a very narrow range of operations. As a result, we see a flurry of online questions from Tidy users asking “How do I do such-and-such,” when a base-R solution would be simple and straightforward.

I believe the examples here illustrate that base-R solutions tend to be simpler, and thus that base-R is a better vehicle for R learners. However, another use of this document would be as a tutorial for base-R users who want to learn Tidy, and vice versa.