Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 24, 2014

Writing an R package from scratch

Filed under: Programming,R — Patrick Durusau @ 3:30 pm

Writing an R package from scratch by Hilary Parker.

From the post:

As I have worked on various projects at Etsy, I have accumulated a suite of functions that help me quickly produce tables and charts that I find useful. Because of the nature of iterative development, it often happens that I reuse the functions many times, mostly through the shameful method of copying the functions into the project directory. I have been a fan of the idea of personal R packages for a while, but it always seemed like A Project That I Should Do Someday and someday never came. Until…

Etsy has an amazing week called “hack week” where we all get the opportunity to work on fun projects instead of our regular jobs. I sat down yesterday as part of Etsy’s hack week and decided “I am finally going to make that package I keep saying I am going to make.” It took me such little time that I was hit with that familiar feeling of the joy of optimization combined with the regret of past inefficiencies (joygret?). I wish I could go back in time and create the package the first moment I thought about it, and then use all the saved time to watch cat videos because that really would have been more productive.

This tutorial is not about making a beautiful, perfect R package. This tutorial is about creating a bare-minimum R package so that you don’t have to keep thinking to yourself, “I really should just make an R package with these functions so I don’t have to keep copy/pasting them like a goddamn luddite.” Seriously, it doesn’t have to be about sharing your code (although that is an added benefit!). It is about saving yourself time. (n.b. this is my attitude about all reproducibility.)

A reminder that well organized functions, like documentation, can be a benefit to its creator as well as others.

Organization: It’s not just for the benefit of others.

I try to not leave myself cryptic or half-written notes anymore. 😉

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