[Rd] A few suggestions and perspectives from a PhD student

[Hilmar Berger]

Hi,

On 08/05/17 16:37, Ista Zahn wrote:
> One of the key strengths of R is that packages are not akin to "fan
> created mods". They are a central and necessary part of the R system.
>
I would tend to disagree here. R packages are in their majority not 
maintained by the core R developers. Concepts, features and lifetime 
depend mainly on the maintainers of the package (even though in theory 
GPL will allow to somebody to take over anytime). Several packages that 
are critical for processing big data and providing "modern" 
visualizations introduce concepts quite different from the legacy S/R 
language. I do feel that in a way, current core R shows strongly its 
origin in S, while modern concepts (e.g. data.table, dplyr, ggplot, ...) 
are often only available via extension packages. This is fine if one 
considers R to be a statistical toolkit; as a programming language, 
however, it introduces inconsistencies and uncertainties which could be 
avoided if some of the "modern" parts (including language concepts) 
could be more integrated in core-R.

Best regards,
Hilmar

-- 
Dr. Hilmar Berger, MD
Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology
Charitéplatz 1
D-10117 Berlin
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