Ross Boylan wrote: > On Wed, Jan 03, 2007 at 11:46:16AM -0600, Ricardo Rios wrote: >> Hi wizards, does somebody know Which programming paradigm is the most >> used for make R packages ? Thanks in advance. >> > You need to explain what you mean by the question, for example what > paradigms you have in mind. >
Judging by the R code some people in our department write, the most used paradigm is 'bash something out that works and worry about paradigms later'-paradigm, used in conjunction with the 'write a very long .R file and source() it whenever you want to do something'-paradigm. This seems related to the 'write-first' paradigm, as opposed to the 'think-first' paradigm. Partly this is often due to the exploratory nature of working with R. You get a data set. You go 'okay, well, what's the mean of each column?', and do that. Then you wonder how A depends on B. Then you wonder how A depends on B given, ooh, C. Then you think, well, if I split the data into old and new measurements, rescaled by the median and offset by D, maybe something interesting appears. By now you've written 40 lines of R code and its starting to get messy... By the end of the thesis, instead of a nice neat redistributable R package that would look great on CRAN, there's a whole pile of R code scattered around in various directories. How many statistics departments still teach programming to their undergraduates? We dropped Fortran about 10 years ago, nowadays they maybe type a few things into a script for Matlab in their second year, learn R at the end of year 2, and do a project perhaps with R in their third year. But they are expected to develop their own paradigm for working in R. I don't think the fundamentals of programming, let along the idea of paradigms (functional/OO/whatever) is introduced. Scary. And wandering off-topic. Barry ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
