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> Tidyverse in general, I believe, has saved R from irrelevance. It’s interesting that you say this. I’ve been using R daily for almost 3 years now, and I was

> Tidyverse in general, I believe, has saved R from irrelevance. It’s interesting that you say this. I’ve been using R daily for almost 3 years now, and I was originally taught the Tidyverse. However, I also tutored in biostats and have collaborated with many different faculty and students. On one hand the Tidyverse created an opening for R learners especially, but it has lead to some controversy as well. Trust me when I say there are plenty of R users who have never heard of or used the Tidyverse. It leads to some difficulty in teaching/collaborating because do I use grepl or str_detect? lapply or map? Do they know the magrittr syntax (%>%)? Then there’s non-standard evaluation, which often forces some arbitrary meta-programming on novice programmers. R is foremost the stats language, and tidyverse has attempted to make it more general purpose, for better or worse depending on who you ask.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
Tidyverse is much, much harder to write functions for, which is pretty bad for beginners. The API is lovely, but the non-standard evaluation causes real problems for people. True story: writing tidyverse functions is so hard that I once worked for a company with business critical code running in incredibly long R-scripts with almost no functions, and 100 line pipes. While that may be an extreme example, base-R is much, much easier to get started writing functions for (like I've been using R for a decade now, and the "idiomatic" way to use NSE with ggplot and dplyr has changed multiple times over that time). Meanwhile, base-R is fugly, but its solid and backwards-compatible to a fault.
- antipaul 6y ago
  As a huge fan of tidyverse, I have to agree. Tidy eval is anything but. However, once they get that right, then tidyverse is close to perfection I think the newish “interpolation” syntax with double braces {{ }} is getting there.
  - vharuck 6y ago
    The biggest difficulty of NSE is not the syntax, but the requirement to hold parallel mental models while writing the code: symbolic expressions and value manipulation. Juggling will always be difficult.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    See, it's changed again! Damnit Hadley, why must you do this to me? (Really I'm bitter because I know that I'll end up maintaining a bunch of important code in version N-2 of Hadley's NSE adventures at some point in the future).
    - antipaul 6y ago
      Changed, yes, and finally in the right direction I would say!
      - antipaul 6y ago
        ... and the following is what I mean. I think this is as close to clean and understandable as it can get, for most use cases (variables in functions, including creating new variables): https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/2020/02/glue-strings-and-tidy-eval/ https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/2020/02/glue-strings-and-tidy...

disgruntledphd2 6y ago

Tidyverse is much, much harder to write functions for, which is pretty bad for beginners. The API is lovely, but the non-standard evaluation causes real problems for people. True story: writing tidyverse functions is so hard that I once worked for a company with business critical code running in incredibly long R-scripts with almost no functions, and 100 line pipes. While that may be an extreme example, base-R is much, much easier to get started writing functions for (like I've been using R for a decade now, and the "idiomatic" way to use NSE with ggplot and dplyr has changed multiple times over that time). Meanwhile, base-R is fugly, but its solid and backwards-compatible to a fault.

antipaul 6y ago
As a huge fan of tidyverse, I have to agree. Tidy eval is anything but. However, once they get that right, then tidyverse is close to perfection I think the newish “interpolation” syntax with double braces {{ }} is getting there.
- vharuck 6y ago
  The biggest difficulty of NSE is not the syntax, but the requirement to hold parallel mental models while writing the code: symbolic expressions and value manipulation. Juggling will always be difficult.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  See, it's changed again! Damnit Hadley, why must you do this to me? (Really I'm bitter because I know that I'll end up maintaining a bunch of important code in version N-2 of Hadley's NSE adventures at some point in the future).
  - antipaul 6y ago
    Changed, yes, and finally in the right direction I would say!
    - antipaul 6y ago
      ... and the following is what I mean. I think this is as close to clean and understandable as it can get, for most use cases (variables in functions, including creating new variables): https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/2020/02/glue-strings-and-tidy-eval/ https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/2020/02/glue-strings-and-tidy...