[R-pkg-devel] UseR! Session: Navigating the jungle of R packages.

[Jonathon Love]

hi,

first up let me apologise for breaking the thread. i subscribed to this 
list after the initial email went out.

i'm not completely sure if the original post was to prompt a discussion 
here, but now there's a discussion, i'm jumping in!

i'm a psychologist, and one of the challenges is the number of packages 
required to do what is "standard practice", and getting them all to work 
together.

to do an ANOVA (the bread and butter of psych research) with all it's 
assumption checks, contrasts, corrections, etc. requires in the order of 
seven packages.

our solution to this is to create an "uber" package, which makes use of 
all these things behind a single function call (with many arguments), 
which is what our jmv package is:

https://www.jamovi.org/jmv/

we represent an extreme, we even handle plots, but there are other 
examples of more intermediate solutions: afex, psych, etc.

i appreciate this is somewhat at odds with (what i perceive to be) the R 
ethos, which is giving people very fine control over the intermediate 
parts of one's analysis, but it is another approach to making it easier 
for people to find appropriate tools for their field.

for me, the key is being "goal-centred", "what is a person in my field 
trying to achieve?" rather than "analysis-centred"; "this package 
provides analysis X" ... but i appreciate this is likely an unpopular 
position.

i'll definitely be attending this session at use!R, and happy to espouse 
more unpopular views

cheers

jonathon


> Navigating the Jungle of R Packages
>
> The R ecosystem has many packages in various collections,
> especially CRAN, Bioconductor, and GitHub. While this
> richness of choice speaks to the popularity and
> importance of R, the large number of contributed packages
> makes it difficult for users to find appropriate tools for
> their work.
>
> A session on this subject has been approved for UseR! in
> Brussels. The tentative structure is three short
> introductory presentations, followed by discussion or
> planning work to improve the tools available to help
> users find the best R package and function for their needs.
>
> The currently proposed topics are
>
> - wrapper packages that allow diverse tools that perform
>   similar functions to be accessed by unified calls
>
> - collaborative mechanisms to create and update Task Views
>
> - search and sort tools to find packages.
>
> At the time of writing we have tentative presenters for
> the topics, but welcome others. We hope these presentations
> at useR! 2017 will be part of a larger discussion that will
> contribute to an increased team effort after the conference
> to improve the the support for R users in these areas.
>
>
> John Nash, Julia Silge, Spencer Graves
>