Publications by John Mount
What are the Popular R Packages?
“R is its packages”, so to know R we should know its popular packages (CRAN). Or put it another way: as R is a typical “the reference implementation is the specification” programming environment there is no true “de jure” R, only a de facto R. To look at popular R packages I defined “popular” as used (Depends/Imports/LinkingTo) by...
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Why RcppDynProg is Written in C++
The (matter of opinion) claim: “When the use of C++ is very limited and easy to avoid, perhaps it is the best option to do that […]” (source discussed here) got me thinking: does our own RcppDynProg package actually use C++ in a significant way? Could/should I port it to C? Am I informed enough to use something as complicated as C++ correc...
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Not Always C++’s Fault
From the recent developer.r-project.org “Staged Install” article: Incidentally, there were just two distinct (very long) lists of methods in the warnings across all installed packages in my run, but repeated for many packages. It turned out that they were lists of exported methods from dplyr and rlang packages. These two packages take very l...
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Practical Data Science with R Book Update
A good friend shared with us a great picture of Practical Data Science with R, 1st Edition hanging out in Cambridge at the MIT Press Bookstore. This is as good an excuse as any to share a book update. Nina Zumel and I (John Mount) are busy revising chapters 10 and 11 of Practical Data Science with R, 2nd Edition. We expect the second edition t...
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R Photo
A good friend is now a professor at the University of Auckland and knew to photograph and send us this. Thanks!!! Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: R – Win-Vector Blog. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Clic...
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Piping is Method Chaining
What R users now call piping, popularized by Stefan Milton Bache and Hadley Wickham, is inline function application (this is notationally similar to, but distinct from the powerful interprocess communication and concurrency tool introduced to Unix by Douglas McIlroy in 1973). In object oriented languages this sort of notation for function applica...
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Controlling Data Layout With cdata
Here is an example how easy it is to use cdata to re-layout your data. Tim Morris recently tweeted the following problem (corrected). Please will you take pity on me #rstats folks? I only want to reshape two variables x & y from wide to long! Starting with: d xa xb ya yb 1 1 3 6 8 2 2 4 7 9 How can I get to: id t x y ...
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Practical Data Science with R Book Update (April 2019)
I thought I would give a personal update on our book: Practical Data Science with R 2nd edition; Zumel, Mount; Manning 2019. The second edition should be fully available this fall! Nina and I have finished up through chapter 10 (of 12), and Manning has released previews of up through chapter 7 (with more to come!). At this point the second edit...
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Data Layout Exercises
John Mount, Nina Zumel; Win-Vector LLC 2019-04-27 In this note we will use five real life examples to demonstrate data layout transforms using the cdata R package. The examples for this note are all demo-examples from tidyr/demo/, and are mostly based on questions posted to StackOverflow. They represent a good cross-section of data layout problem...
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Could not Resist
Also, Practical Data Science with R, 2nd Edition; Zumel, Mount; Manning 2019 is now content complete! It is deep into editing and soon into production! Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: R – Win-Vector Blog. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about...
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