A lot of people consider the static typing found in languages such as C, C++, ML, Java and Scala as needless hairshirtism. They consider the dynamic typing of languages like Lisp, Scheme, Perl, Ruby and Python as a critical advantage (ignoring other features of these languages and other efforts at ... [Read more...]

I may want to add a subtitle “Why R-Forge Must Die” (thinking of Barry Rowlingson’s talk earlier this year). I have been a GitHub user for two years, and I was mainly influenced by Hadley. Now I even feel a little bit addicted to GitHub (its slogan is “social ... [Read more...]

Programmers should definitely know how to use R. I don’t mean they should switch from their current language to R, but they should think of R as a handy tool during development.Again and again I find myself working with Java code like the following. td.linenos { background-color: #f0... [Read more...]

bout half a year ago, I wrote a post on the configuration of (pgf)Sweave and LyX, which was intended to save us some efforts in going through all the details during the configuration. Now many things have changed: LyX 2.0 has internal support for Sweave, and fortunately I have been ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Earlier this week I published a data visualization on the Facebook Engineering blog which, to my surprise, has received a lot of media covereage. I’ve received a lot comments about the image, many asking for more details on how I … Continue reading → [Read more...]

al Galili requested in the R-help mailing list for a SyntaxHighlighter brush for the R language, so that WordPress users can highlight their R code easily. I promised to contribute a few minutes on this task, and here is the result: /** * Author: Yihui Xie * URL: http://yihui.name/en/2010/09/syntaxhighlighter-brush-for-the-r-language * ... [Read more...]

Auto-completion is fancy in a text editor. Notepad++ does not support auto-completion for the R language, so I spent a couple of hours on creating such an XML file to support R: Put it under ‘plugins/APIs‘ in the installation directory of Notepad++ (you can see several other XML files ... [Read more...]

hen we want to call external programs in R under Windows, we often need to know the paths of these programs. For instance, we may want to know where ImageMagick is installed, as we need the convert (convert.exe) utility to convert images to other formats, or where OpenBUGS is ... [Read more...]

tephanie asked in 511 today if we were able to get the random seed which was set by set.seed() but we were only given the random numbers (without knowing the seed). This kind of “hacker” questions sound interesting. One dirty solution should be the brute-force method, e.g: # x: the ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

s Sir Francis Bacon said, “Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.” And Windows stupid. He should have added the last sentence if he were a Windows user in this age. 1. Avoid Using M$ Excel A lot ... [Read more...]

ag cloud is a bunch of words drawn in a graph with their sizes proportional to their frequency; it’s widely used in blogs to visualize tags. We can observe important words quickly from a tag cloud, as they often appear in large fontsize. Tony N. Brown asked how to “... [Read more...]