R programming has seen a big shift in the last couple of years. All those packages that RStudio have been creating to solve this or that problem suddenly started to cohere into a larger ecosystem of packages. Once it was given a name, the tidyverse, it became possible to start ... [Read more...]

I’m starting a new R User Group in Doha, Qatar.  Our first meetup is on 26th May, at the HBKU Student Center in Education City.  I’ll be talking about run-time testing with my assertive package, and there will be two other speakers who I need to find pretty ... [Read more...]

One of the bits of feedback that I got from the useR conference was that my assertive package, for run-time testing of code, was too big. Since then I’ve been working to modularise it, and the results are now on CRAN. Now, rather than one big package, there are ... [Read more...]

Microsoft have announced new funding for R User Groups (Python and Hadoop too), so now seems as good a time as any for me to stop procrastinating and set up a Qatar R User Group. If you live anywhere near Doha, and are interested in coming along to a (probably ... [Read more...]

I had an interesting email today saying that developers at the writer’s company wanted to use one of my packages, but weren’t allowed because it was under an unlimited license. I release quite a few of my packages under an unlimited licence, at least for toy projects and ... [Read more...]

I gave a tutorial at useR on testing R code, which turned out to be a great way of getting feedback on my code! Based on the suggestions by attendees, I’ve made a big update to the package, which is now on CRAN. Full details of the new features ... [Read more...]

“Assertion” is computer-science jargon for a run-time check on your code. In R , this typically means function argument checks (“did they pass a numeric vector rather than a character vector into your function?”), and data quality checks (“does the date-of-birth column contain values in the past?”). The four packages R ... [Read more...]

The morning opened with someone who I was too bleary eyed to work out who it was. Possibly the dean of the University of Aalborg. Anyway, he said that this is the largest ever useR conference, and the first ever in a Nordic country. Take that, Norway! Also, considering that ... [Read more...]

It turns out that when people tell you things, you should listen. Like when Joe Rickert of Microsoft says “this is not news, please don’t repeat what I’m about to say”, you should maybe take note and keep your mouth shut. I’m not quite sure how I ... [Read more...]

More excellent talks today! Andrie de Vries of Microsoft kicked off today’s talks with a demo of checkpoint. This is his package for assisting reproducibility by letting you install packages from a specific date. The idea is that a lot of R packages, particularly those from PhD projects don’... [Read more...]

At day one of the R Summit at Copenhagen Business School there was a lot of talk about the performance of R, and alternate R interpreters. Luke Tierney of the University of Iowa, the author of the compiler package, and R-Core member who has been working on R’s performance ... [Read more...]

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Over the last week or two I’ve been pushing all my packages to CRAN. pathological (for working with file paths), runittotestthat (for converting RUnit tests to testthat tests), and rebus (formerly regex, for building regular expressions in a human readable way) all make their CRAN debuts. assertive, for run-time ... [Read more...]

A couple of months ago I spotted that the examples for the paste function weren’t very good, and actually, there were quite a few functions that new users of R are likely to encounter, that weren’t well explained. I’ve now managed to get some updated examples into ... [Read more...]

Last month I was ranting about the state of some of the examples in base-R, particularly the paste function. Martin Maechler has now kindly taken my suggested examples and added them into R. Hopefully this will reduce the number of newbie questions about “how do I join these strings together”. ... [Read more...]

Earlier today I saw the hundred bazillionth question about how to use the paste function. My initial response was “take a look at example(paste) to see how it works”. Then I looked at example(paste), and it turns out that it’s not very good at all. There isn’... [Read more...]

Regular expressions are an amazing tool for working with character data, but they are also painful to read and write.  Even after years of working with them, I struggle to remember the syntax for negative lookahead, or which way round the start and end anchor symbols go. Consequently, I’ve ... [Read more...]

There’s a new version of my assertive package, for sanity-checking code, on its way to CRAN. The release has been delayed a while, since my previous attempt at an upload met with an error that was only generated on the CRAN machine, but not on my own. The problem ... [Read more...]

I was recently hunting for a function that will strip the extension from a file – changing foo.png to foo, and so forth. I was knitting a report, and wanted to replace the file extension of the input with the extension of the the output file. (knitr handles this automatically ... [Read more...]

There are lots of R engines emerging! I’ve interviewed members of each of the teams involved in these projects. In part 1 of this series, we covered the motivation of each project. Part 2 looked at the technical achievements and new features. This part tries to determine which projects are suitable ... [Read more...]