Publications by David Smith
Copilot for R
It was my great pleasure to present last week to the NYC Data Hackers on the topic of Copilot for R. If you haven't come across Copilot before, it's like an AI-based pair programmer that suggests new lines of code, and perhaps entire functions, based on context. In the presentation (video below) I showed how while I was editing in Visual Studio Cod...
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MRAN Time Machine will be retired on July 1
On July 1 2023, the MRAN website and the CRAN snapshot archive hosted therein will be retired, Microsoft announced last week. One purpose of MRAN was to distribute Microsoft R Open, which was discontinued in 2021. MRAN has also served since 2014 as the repository of a daily archive of CRAN packages. Some R users may still be using these static ...
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Easy R Tutorials with Dev Containers
Ever written a tutorial for R — or simply shared some R code with someone — and been told that your code doesn't work on their machine? There's now an easy way to solve that problem: Dev Containers. Dev Containers are a standardized container format designed for interactive use. You can set up a Dev Container with the specific version of R, R...
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How R is disrupting a billion-dollar market
Zack Urlocker, the EVP for Products at MySQL before it was acquired by Sun (and now an executive at Sun) has written an article at InfoWorld suggesting that the recent rash of articles looking at how IBM’s acquisition of SPSS is affecting the BI market dominated by SAS are downplaying the real agent of change in the space: R. According to Ur...
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Because it’s Friday: The Earth, with rings
To wind down your afternoon, relax and enjoy the view from various places around the globe of the Earth’s rings in the sky … if the Earth, like Saturn, had rings subject to the Roche Limit. YouTube: What Earth Would Look Like With Rings Like Saturn Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog...
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R, REvolution named in top analytic trends for 2010
Author and enterprise software executive Nenshad Bardoliwalla lists his Top 10 Trends for 2010 in Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management at the website Enterprise Irregulars. If you’ve been following the Business Intelligence space (and who hasn’t, right?) you’ll recognize some familiar themes: predictive analytics, W...
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Package Update Roundup: Nov 2009
This is a list of new or updated packages that were released for R in November, as announced on the r-packages mailing list. To include other updates on this list, please email David Smith. For a complete list of all updates on CRAN, see the CRANberries archive for November 2009. Follow package name links for ratings and other information on...
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The top 5 R functions
John Myles White (who did the Canabalt scores analysis from last month) was trying to decide which R functions to spend time learning, and asked the obvious followup question: Which functions in R are used the most? With no readily-available answer, John answered the question himself, by counting the number of times each function is called in all...
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Happy 1st Birthday, Revolutions!
Wow, doesn’t time fly! It’s hard to believe that this blog is one year old already: our first post was on December 9, 2008. I remember when we first had the idea of doing a blog exclusively devoted to R that some wondered if there would be enough news about R to warrant daily updates, but with the community growing so explosively over the pas...
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The R Graphical Manual
R has a lot of functions. Add in all the packages on CRAN, and then there’s a lot of functions. You can search through the contents of the function documentation at places like Rseek.org, but the R Graphical Manual takes a different tack on exploring the functions in R: rather than browsing by the name or description of the functions, you brows...
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