Publications by richierocks
Automatically convert RUnit tests to testthat tests
There’s a new version of my assertive package, for sanity-checking code, on its way to CRAN. The release has been delayed a while, since my previous attempt at an upload met with an error that was only generated on the CRAN machine, but not on my own. The problem lay with some code designed to autorun the RUnit tests for the package. After fid...
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Regular expressions for everyone else
Regular expressions are an amazing tool for working with character data, but they are also painful to read and write. Even after years of working with them, I struggle to remember the syntax for negative lookahead, or which way round the start and end anchor symbols go. Consequently, I’ve created the regex package for human readable regular e...
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Improving base-R examples
Earlier today I saw the hundred bazillionth question about how to use the paste function. My initial response was “take a look at example(paste) to see how it works”. Then I looked at example(paste), and it turns out that it’s not very good at all. There isn’t even an example of how to use the collapse argument. Considering that paste ...
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Update on improving examples in base-R
Last month I was ranting about the state of some of the examples in base-R, particularly the paste function. Martin Maechler has now kindly taken my suggested examples and added them into R. Hopefully this will reduce the number of newbie questions about “how do I join these strings together”. Since Martin showed some interest in improving t...
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How do you get things into base-R?
A couple of months ago I spotted that the examples for the paste function weren’t very good, and actually, there were quite a few functions that new users of R are likely to encounter, that weren’t well explained. I’ve now managed to get some updated examples into R (paste, sum, NumericConstants, pie, a couple dozen more functions hopefully...
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Many package updates on CRAN
Over the last week or two I’ve been pushing all my packages to CRAN. pathological (for working with file paths), runittotestthat (for converting RUnit tests to testthat tests), and rebus (formerly regex, for building regular expressions in a human readable way) all make their CRAN debuts. assertive, for run-time testing your code has more check...
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Thoughts on R’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Documentation
A couple of days ago Pete Werner had a rant about the state of R’s documentation. A lot of it was misguided, but it had some legitimate complaints, and the fact that people can perceive R’s documentation as being bad (whether accurate or not) is important in itself. The exponential growth in R’s popularity means that a large proportion of ...
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The Workflow of Infinite Shame, and other stories from the R Summit
At day one of the R Summit at Copenhagen Business School there was a lot of talk about the performance of R, and alternate R interpreters. Luke Tierney of the University of Iowa, the author of the compiler package, and R-Core member who has been working on R’s performance since, well, pretty much since R was created, talked about future improve...
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Everyone loves R markdown and Github; stories from the R Summit, day two
More excellent talks today! Andrie de Vries of Microsoft kicked off today’s talks with a demo of checkpoint. This is his package for assisting reproducibility by letting you install packages from a specific date. The idea is that a lot of R packages, particularly those from PhD projects don’t get maintained, and suffer bitrot. That means th...
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How I made every tech company that I may ever want to work for in the future hate me, or “GO R Consortium!”
It turns out that when people tell you things, you should listen. Like when Joe Rickert of Microsoft says “this is not news, please don’t repeat what I’m about to say”, you should maybe take note and keep your mouth shut. I’m not quite sure how I missed that, but I did. So on Sunday night I wrote a blog post about what happened at the...
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