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I agree with your assessment of the claims made in this post, but I want to note that for me the tidyverse culture became the reason to abandon R for all use ca
by macleginn 5y ago
I agree with your assessment of the claims made in this post, but I want to note that for me the tidyverse culture became the reason to abandon R for all use cases where it has decent alternatives. R is not pretty, but it is also not super hard, and it has some internal logic. tidyverse's logic is orthogonal to that of R, it is a different data-manipulation paradigm, which I know have to know in addition to having to know R itself---not that you can really skip this part. Also, as it has been already mentioned here, this layering doesn't help with debugging.
ggplot2 did a similar thing with plotting. Together these two projects made R more accessible-like and, IMO, seriously damaged the culture around it.
- asdff 5y agotidyverse has ruined stackoverflow. So many questions could be answered with base R, and sometimes you might need to do base R if you want your code widely compatible, but people insist on submitting some arcane ggplot2 or dpylr code instead, and nothing is learned about R.
- rossdavidh 5y agoOne is reminded of javascript and jquery, a few years back.
- dash2 5y agoSure! It's brought lots of neophytes into the language, who don't really understand base R. That's a problem of success. If we were still stuck using interfaces like base::reshape, base::merge and (shudder) the lattice package, then there'd be fewer users and they'd all be more expert by necessity.