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I am not sure there is a language where the median user's code looks more different from 2012 to now than R's. RStudio and the tidyverse have basically created
by cwyers 7y ago
I am not sure there is a language where the median user's code looks more different from 2012 to now than R's. RStudio and the tidyverse have basically created an all-new "standard" library for the language that has gotten extremely wide adoption, and it tends to smooth over a lot of R's warts if you stay with code that has been written to fit with the style of code that the tidyverse encourages.
- oarabbus_ 7y agoThis sounds like something that in most other languages, would have become R v2 (non-backwards-compatible)? Why does R retrofit instead of enforce best practices?
- citrate05 7y agoThe short answer is that "tidyverse" is a set of third-party packages that was developed by a different team than base R. It's not a modification of the language itself. This is possible because of certain features of R that make it particularly syntactically flexible (see, e.g., https://adv-r.hadley.nz/metaprogramming.html https://adv-r.hadley.nz/metaprogramming.html).
- cwyers 7y agoI know of exactly nobody who was happy with how the Perl 5 to Perl 6 transition went, or the Python 2 to Python 3 transition. I think not ever having a firm cutover like that was beneficial to R. EDIT: And yes, as citrate05 says, it's just an additional set of libraries. There's no changes to the language itself.
- skinnymuch 7y agoPython wasn’t pretty but I’m happy it was done. Than if we were still on python 2 with only a portion of the changes. There would be a lot of discontent if that was the case too.