I keep hearing the assertion that “writing APL/Haskell/etc… makes you think differently” and I kept wondering why I agreed with the statement but at the same time didn’t think too much of it. I believe I’ve figured out that it’s because I happened to h...

One thing that has really caught my attention as I learn more programming languages is the idea of generators or infinite sequences of values. Yes, infinite. Coming from R, that seems unlikely, but in at least several other languages, it’s entirely pos...

I’ve been learning at least one new programming language per month through Exercism and the #12in23 challenge. I’ve keep saying, every time you learn a new language, you learn something about all the others you know. Plus, once you know \(N\) languages, the \(N+1^{\rm th}\) is significantly ...

Your collaborator says to you “I have some code I’d like to distribute to people who will probably work in R most of the time. I don’t write R, but I write C. Can you package this up for me?” so you have a few options: re-write the ...

I’ve been learning at least one new programming language a month through Exercism which has been really fun and interesting. I frequently say that “every language you learn teaches you something about all the others you know” and with nearly a dozen under my belt so far I’m ...

I’ve been following the drama of the RustConf Keynote Fiasco (RKNF, per @fasterthanlime) from a great distance - I’m not involved in that community beyond starting to learn the language. But the controversial topic itself Compile-Time Reflection seemed like something interesting I could learn something about. A good ...

Plotly has a nice way of making click-events available to the calling language, but it doesn’t quite work simply when using subplot(). This isn’t a post about a new feature, but I didn’t quickly find a resource for it so I’ll add my findings to make ...

Don’t show me puzzles, unless you want to be responsible for me staying up too late solving them. I’m far too easily nerd-sniped. This one was certainly the most complex I’ve ever solved. Quite complicated too, but definitely the most complex (you’ll s...

I’ve had the impression lately that everyone is learning Rust and there’s plenty of great material out there to make that easier. {gifski} is perhaps the most well-known example of an R package wrapping a Rust Cargo crate. I don’t really know any system language particularly well, ...

I took a very long time to post about the last Australian Signals Directorate (then DSD) decryption, so this time I’ll be a lot more punctual. This article was published today announcing that ASD have collaborated to release a new 50c coin containing a...

I occasionally like to participate in an odd sport known as ‘code golf’ where the aim is to write some code to achieve a given task using the smallest number of characters. The tradtional way to cheat at golf is to lower your score R isn’t optimised...

I just finished ‘Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software’ by Charles Petzold which was a really well-written (in my opinion) guided journey from flashing a light in morse code through to building a whole computer, and everything needed along the way. The section on encoding instructions for ...

I saw this post on Reddit’s r/dataisbeautiful showing this plot of streaming services market share, comparing 2020 to 2021 US Streaming Services Market Share, 2020 vs 2021 and thought it looked like a good candidate for trying out some plot improvem...

I’ve written a few times about using an image as an x-axis label, and the solutions have been slowly improving. This one blows all of them out of the water. Claus Wilke (@ClausWilke) now has a {ggtext} package which can very neatly add images as x-axis labels! This makes ...

This journey started almost exactly a year ago, but it’s finally been sufficiently worked through and merged! Yay, I’ve officially contributed to the tidyverse (minor as it may be). I’m at least as useful as Zoidberg It began with a tweet, recalling a surprise I encountered that ...

This journey started almost exactly a year ago, but it’s finally been sufficiently worked through and merged! Yay, I’ve officially contributed to the tidyverse (minor as it may be). It began with a tweet, recalling a surprise I encountered that...Continue Reading →