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user2013: The Rcpp tutorial
I’m at user 2013, and this morning I attended Hadley Wickham and Romain Francois’s tutorial on the Rcpp package for calling C++ code from R. I’ve spent the last eight years avoiding C++ afer having...
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user2013: The caret tutorial
This afternoon I went to Max Kuhn’s tutorial on his caret package. caret stands for classification and regression (something beginning with e) trees. It provides a consistent interface to nearly 150...
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How R will turn into SQL
Up until very recently the only way of running R code was through the standard R distribution. Of course you could use another IDE, but somewhere underneath it all you would be running the same,...
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The Secrets of Inverse Brogramming, reprise
Brogramming is the art of looking good while you write code. Inverse brogramming is a silly term that I’m trying to coin for the opposite, but more important, concept: the art of writing good looking...
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The tenure of Doctor Who incarnations
With a new actor being announced tomorrow, it got me pondering about the good Doctor. Specifically, who is the longest serving doctor? IMDB has the data: whos <- data.frame( doctor = c( "William...
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Fearsome Engines, Part 1
Back in June I discovered pqR, Radford Neal’s fork of R designed to improve performance. Then in July, I heard about Tibco’s TERR, a C++ rewrite of the R engine suitable for the enterprise. At this...
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O’Reilly R ebooks half price – today only
Including my hot-off-the-press Learning R. Buy two copies! http://oreil.ly/1eRrhP1 Tagged: book, deal, oreilly, r, special offer
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Webcast on Writing Great R Code
While I’m promoting things, you might also want to know that I’m doing a webcast on how to write great R code next Wednesday. It’s at 6pm British Summer Time or 10am Pacific Daylight Time. the big...
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Fearsome Engines Part 2: Innovations and new features
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. This part looks at...
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Fearsome Engines Part 3: Which one should you use?
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...
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Introducing the pathological package for manipulating paths, files and...
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...
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Automatically convert RUnit tests to testthat tests
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...
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Finally, a use for rapply
In the apply family of functions, rapply is the unloved ginger stepchild. While lapply, sapply and vapply make regular appearances in my code, and apply and tapply have occasional cameo appearances, in...
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Regular expressions for everyone else
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...
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Improving base-R examples
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),...
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Update on improving examples in base-R
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...
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How do you get things into base-R?
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...
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Many package updates on CRAN
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...
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Thoughts on R’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Documentation
A couple of days ago Pete Werner had a rant about the state of R’s documentation. A lot of it was misguided, but it had some legitimate complaints, and the fact that people can perceive R’s...
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The Workflow of Infinite Shame, and other stories from the R Summit
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...
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