Publications by John Mount
In praise of syntactic sugar
There has been some talk of adding native pipe notation to R (for example here, here, and here). I think a critical aspect of such an extension would be to treat such a notation as syntactic sugar and not insist such a pipe match magrittr semantics, or worse yet give a platform for authors to insert their own preferred ad-hoc semantics. A promin...
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What is magrittr’s future in the tidyverse?
For many R users the magrittr pipe is a popular way to arrange computation and famously part of the tidyverse. The tidyverse itself is a rapidly evolving centrally controlled package collection. The tidyverse authors publicly appear to be interested in re-basing the tidyverse in terms of their new rlang/tidyeval package. So it is natural to w...
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Better Grouped Summaries in dplyr
For R dplyr users one of the promises of the new rlang/tidyeval system is an improved ability to program over dplyr itself. In particular to add new verbs that encapsulate previously compound steps into better self-documenting atomic steps. Let’s take a look at this capability. First let’s start dplyr. suppressPackageStartupMessages(library...
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dplyr 0.7 Made Simpler
I have been writing a lot (too much) on the R topics dplyr/rlang/tidyeval lately. The reason is: major changes were recently announced. If you are going to use dplyr well and correctly going forward you may need to understand some of the new issues (if you don’t use dplyr you can safely skip all of this). I am trying to work out (publicly) how ...
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seplyr update
The development version of my new R package seplyr is performing in practical applications with dplyr 0.7.* much better than even I (the seplyr package author) expected. I think I have hit a very good set of trade-offs, and I have now spent significant time creating documentation and examples. I wish there had been such a package weeks ago, and t...
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Tutorial: Using seplyr to Program Over dplyr
seplyr is an R package that makes it easy to program over dplyr 0.7.*. To illustrate this we will work an example. Suppose you had worked out a dplyr pipeline that performed an analysis you were interested in. For an example we could take something similar to one of the examples from the dplyr 0.7.0 announcement. suppressPackageStartupMessages(...
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More documentation for Win-Vector R packages
The Win-Vector public R packages now all have new pkgdown documentation sites! (And, a thank-you to Hadley Wickham for developing the pkgdown tool.) Please check them out (hint: vtreat is our favorite). The package sites: cdata replyr seplyr sigr vtreat wrapr WVPlots. For more on all of these packages, please see the Win-Vector blog. Related ...
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Let’s Have Some Sympathy For The Part-time R User
When I started writing about methods for better “parametric programming” interfaces for dplyr for R dplyr users in December of 2016 I encountered three divisions in the audience: dplyr users who had such a need, and wanted such extensions. dplyr users who did not have such a need (“we always know the column names”). dplyr users who found...
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More on “The Part-Time R-User”
I have some more thoughts on the topic: “the part-time R-user.” I am thinking a bit more about the diversity R users. It occurs to me simply dividing R users into two groups, beginning and advanced, neglects a very important group: the part-time R user. This leaves us teachers and package developers with an unfortunate bias. The concept of ...
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Supervised Learning in R: Regression
We are very excited to announce a new (paid) Win-Vector LLC video training course: Supervised Learning in R: Regression now available on DataCamp The course is primarily authored by Dr. Nina Zumel (our chief of course design) with contributions from Dr. John Mount. This course will get you quickly up to speed covering: What is regression? (Hint...
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