[R] (Off-Topic) Time for a companion mailing list for R packages?

Avi Gross @v|gro@@ @end|ng |rom ver|zon@net
Thu Jan 13 19:05:10 CET 2022 

Kevin,
My thought was to have a specific place you can direct people to if their main problem or question was outside the reasonable scope of this group but clearly about R and about fairly well-used packages.
There are thousands of packages and I know if I bothered to put one out there, I would not necessarily be willing to volunteer to support it by answering questions from anyone who asked. So I suspect getting replies from package owners or contacts in general, is not that reliable or quick.
R STUDIO is a factor here in that there is a cluster of packages they are associated with. Given it's popularity, it is not a shock if quite a few questions relate to such packages and I think more packages may be entering their domain over time. There may be other packages used often that are commonly used and many hardly anyone would mention.
Who would monitor such groups is always a question, as well as who would take the time to answer. But if the people on this forum who are not interested simply stay here and direct any questions to there politely, maybe it would overall be a better experience. Of course, the people here might also suggest a more base-R approach to solving a problem that might also be satisfactory.
I am in both camps and especially when students who are learning base R are guided to use what was taught in class, rather than pre-built ...
But I also appreciate when someone has a nice and general set of tools that is well designed and well tested and has advantages that can range from being faster to easier to program to just automating fairly tedious and repetitive things otherwise done. 
I will say this. By adding some features like a version of a pipe to base R, I think it fair to say that the base R we are talking about can well be expanding so that over time, some packages may become less attractive or necessary. There are things that would be nice to be able to use without having to ask for them to be loaded and might be quite useful and very commonly used. But as discussed here, maintaining the bloat ...


-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Thorpe <kevin.thorpe using utoronto.ca>
To: Jeff Newmiller <jdnewmil using dcn.davis.ca.us>
Cc: Avi Gross <avigross using verizon.net>; R Help Mailing List <r-help using r-project.org>
Sent: Thu, Jan 13, 2022 7:44 am
Subject: Re: [R] (Off-Topic) Time for a companion mailing list for R packages?

This is an interesting issue and something I have been thinking about raising with my fellow volunteer moderators.

I honestly don’t know what the best solution is. Personally, I would loathe having to check multiple web-forums/mailing lists to find an answer. New users often do not appreciate the subtleties (i.e. RStudio is not R) and will continue to post here. The frequent reply to questions outside base R that inform them they are off-topic could come across as unfriendly. That could have the side effect of making the community appear elitist. Folks are also often referred to package maintainers but not all maintainers are equally responsive to queries about their packages. In summary, it can be very hard for novice users to get the help they need.

I appreciate the desire of many to keep the focus of this list narrow, yet despite the narrow mandate there are many readers who can answer non-base R questions, which is probably one of the reasons we see the questions. I wonder if there would be an appetite to create a new list, R-package-help, that has a broad mandate (as suggested by Avi). Naturally there is no guarantee that specific questions about some esoteric package will be answered, but that’s a different problem. On the other hand, why not expand the mandate of R-help rather than going to the trouble of creating a new list? Like I said, I don’t know.

Thanks for raising the issue.

Kevin


> On Jan 12, 2022, at 11:24 PM, Jeff Newmiller <jdnewmil using dcn.davis.ca.us> wrote:
> 
> TL;DR The people responsible for tidyverse don't think much of mailing lists.
> 
> IANAMLA (I am not mailing list admin) and I know some people get kind of heated about these things, but my take is that this list _is_ about R so to be on topic the question needs to be about R and how to get things done in R. Since contributed packages are almost by definition creating capabilities linked with specific problem domains or domain-specific-languages (DSLs), and there are thousands of these, it isn't practical to support questions framed within those DSLs here. It seems perfectly legitimate IMHO to mention such packages here, as long as the question does not hinge on that package, and even to offer small solutions to posed R problems using such packages. Others may disagree with my perspective on this. Unfortunately all of this this subtlety is usually lost upon newbies, much to the detriment of this list's reputation.
> 
> The responsibility to setup and manage support for contributed packages belongs to the package maintainer. In the case of tidyverse, the general opinion of those people seems to be that web forums avoid the "only unformatted info can be shared" nature of traditional mailing lists, so mailing lists have AFAIK not been built or tended.
> 
> Unfortunately, they also try to "allow all topics" as much as possible in those forums to minimize the appearance of unfriendliness to beginners, but my impression is that this leads to such a wide range of topics that many posts don't get answered. I have certainly found it to be just too much quantity to sift through, and I really am selective about which portions of the tidyverse I work with anyway, so I don't hang out there much at all.
> 
> On January 12, 2022 7:27:20 PM PST, Avi Gross via R-help <r-help using r-project.org> wrote:
>> Respectfully, this forum gets lots of questions that include non-base R components and especially packages in the tidyverse. Like it or not, the extended R language is far more useful and interesting for many people and especially those who do not wish to constantly reinvent the wheel.
>> And repeatedly, we get people reminding (and sometimes chiding) others for daring to post questions or supply answers on what they see as a pure R list. They have a point.
>> Yes, there are other places (many not being mailing lists like this one) where we can direct the questions but why can't there be an official mailing list alongside this one specifically focused on helping or just discussing R issues related partially to the use of packages. I don't mean for people making a package to share, just users who may be searching for an appropriate package or using a common package, especially the ones in the tidyverse that are NOT GOING AWAY just because some purists ...
>> I prefer a diverse set of ways to do things and base R is NOT enough for me, nor frankly is R with all packages included as I find other languages suit my needs at times for doing various things. If this group is for purists, fine. Can we have another for the rest of us? Live and let live.
>> 
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
>> To: Kai Yang <yangkai9999 using yahoo.com>; R-help Mailing List <r-help using r-project.org>
>> Sent: Wed, Jan 12, 2022 3:22 pm
>> Subject: Re: [R] how to find the table in R studio
>> 
>> On 12/01/2022 3:07 p.m., Kai Yang via R-help wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>> I created a function in R. It will be generate a table "temp". I can view it in R studio, but I cannot find it on the top right window in R studio. Can someone tell me how to find it in there? Same thing for f_table.
>>> Thank you,
>>> Kai
>>> library(tidyverse)
>>> 
>>> f1 <- function(indata , subgrp1){
>>>    subgrp1 <- enquo(subgrp1)
>>>    indata0 <- indata
>>>    temp    <- indata0 %>% select(!!subgrp1) %>% arrange(!!subgrp1) %>%
>>>      group_by(!!subgrp1) %>%
>>>      mutate(numbering =row_number(), max=max(numbering))
>>>    view(temp)
>>>    f_table <- table(temp$Species)
>>>    view(f_table)
>>> }
>>> 
>>> f1(iris, Species)
>>> 
>> 
>> Someone is sure to point out that this isn't an RStudio support list, 
>> but your issue is with R, not with RStudio.  You created the table in 
>> f1, but you never returned it.  The variable f_table is local to the 
>> function.  You'd need the following code to do what you want:
>> 
>> f1 <- function(indata , subgrp1){
>>  subgrp1 <- enquo(subgrp1)
>>  indata0 <- indata
>>  temp    <- indata0 %>% select(!!subgrp1) %>% arrange(!!subgrp1) %>%
>>    group_by(!!subgrp1) %>%
>>    mutate(numbering =row_number(), max=max(numbering))
>>  view(temp)
>>  f_table <- table(temp$Species)
>>  view(f_table)
>>  f_table
>> }
>> 
>> f_table <- f1(iris, Species)
>> 
>> It's not so easy to also make temp available.  You can do it with 
>> assign(), but I think you'd be better off splitting f1 into two 
>> functions, one to create temp, and one to create f_table.
>> 
>> Duncan Murdoch
>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>> 
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>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 
> -- 
> Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

-- 
Kevin E. Thorpe
Head of Biostatistics,  Applied Health Research Centre (AHRC)
Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael’s Hospital
Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
University of Toronto
email: kevin.thorpe using utoronto.ca  Tel: 416.864.5776  Fax: 416.864.3016


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