Publications by David Smith
R #6 in IEEE 2015 Top Programming Languages, Rising 3 Places
IEEE Spectrum has published its 2015 list of Top Programming Languages, and R ranks in 6th place, jumping 3 places from its 2014 ranking. Here's what the IEEE has to say about the top 10 from the table above: The big five—Java, C, C++, Python, and C#—remain on top, with their ranking undisturbed, but C has edged to within a whisper of knock...
1908 sym 4 img
Hadley Wickham on why he created all those R packages
Priceonomics published on Friday an in-depth profile of Hadley Wickham, author of many of the most popular R packages including ggplot2, dplyr and devtools. In the article, he reveals that his motivation for creating these packages was primarily to provide better ways of accomplishing routine tasks in R, an immensely useful contribution that sad...
2213 sym 2 img
Streamgraphs in R
It’s not easy to visualize a quantity that varies over time and which is composed of more than two subsegments. Take, for example, this stacked bar chart of religious affiliation of the Australian population, by time: While it’s easy to see the how the share of Anglicans (at the bottom of the chart) has changed over time, it’s much more di...
2071 sym R (254 sym/1 pcs) 4 img
Watch 18 years of R development in 15 minutes
R is an incredibly active software project. Since the first code was checked into Subversion back on 18 September 1997, there have been more than 100,000 updates to the R sources by the 20-some members of the R Core Team. As you can see from the activity graphs from the GitHub mirror of the R sources, the pace of development has been frequent an...
1324 sym 2 img
New ‘R Talk’ podcast with news from R Consortium
There's a new podcast in town, and it's focused on R. Four members of the R community (Oliver Keyes, Wikimedia Foundation; Jasmine Dumas. DePaul University; Ted Hart, Silcon Valley “fruit vendor”; and Mikhail Popov, Wikimedia Foundation) have banded together to produce R Talk, a podcast about “the R Programming language, featuring news, int...
1748 sym
R 3.2.2 released
This just in from the R Core Team: R 3.2.2 has been released. With this update, data accessed over the Web — including files downloaded using download.file via URLS, and packages installed install.packages — will be transmitted using the secure HTTPS protocol. (This has always been an option with prior versions of R, but now it is the default...
1333 sym
Good advice for security with R
Everyone needs to be vigilant about security on the Web today. One particular threat — the man-in-the-middle attack — is a risk anytime you are communicating over the Internet, and an attacker has access to the network between the two endpoints. This is a possibility whenever you are using the Web over an unencrypted channel, or when using an...
2975 sym
Free edX course for R beginners
If you've thought about learning the R language but didn't know how to start, there's a new, free course on edX that starts you from the R basics and lets you learn R by trying R as you go. Presented by DataCamp and Microsoft, the course starts from the very basics of R (arithmetic on the command line, creating variables), progresses through the...
1545 sym 2 img
How R is used at Zillow to estimate housing values
Zillow, the leading real estate and rental marketplace in the USA, uses R to estimate housing values. Zillow's signature product is the Zestimate, their estimated market value for individual homes, and it's calculated using R in a parallel batch job for 100 million homes nationwide. The process is described in this Slideshare presentation Data ...
1667 sym
Get to know Cortana Analytics: Workshop and webinars
Cortana Analytics Suite is Microsoft's cloud-based big data and advanced analytics suite. It includes a complete set of all the services need to build advanced analytics applications: from data ingestion and management, data warehousing, advanced analytics, data visualization and solution frameworks. You can use Cortana Analytics to build appli...
1722 sym 2 img