@mattcowgill@zkamvar why are you worried about the language? Does the R community depend so much on those great well-payed developers than the thousands that contribute for free (including R core members and CRAN team)?
@Lluis_Revilla@mattcowgill@zkamvar tidyverse & the wider set of tools developed and maintained by posit are disproportionally used for practical data analysis. not that you can’t do without those, but if you had to, the reasons to stick with R as a language are much diminished.
@alastairmrushworth
I'm sorry to put it this way, but if you are that much dependent on a small set of packages (where base R can do those things easily), then you are using the language wrong. Practically you have got yourself, your brain, and your code addicted to a small subset of packages. This is no different than using Excel or Matlab where without them your whole world collapses. #RStats is waaaay larger than posit and tidyverse.
@Mehrad@alastairmrushworth@Lluis_Revilla@zkamvar to claim that someone who favours the tidyverse idiom is “using the language wrong” is just a bad, borderline offensive claim, not really worth elaborating
@mattcowgill
Offensive! Nice take! I think this concludes the discussion. Keep up the good work and being worried about R. Meanwhile the rest of us will use and improve R as a language rather than a limited framework 😉
Edit: on second thought, perhaps you can benefit from reading this article, and to get what I meant by "wrong":
@Mehrad@alastairmrushworth@Lluis_Revilla@zkamvar I'm unclear why you've decided to have this attitude towards a random person (me) you've never encountered before. I'm also a heavy R user, package developer, etc. but feel free to look down on me like this if it makes you feel good, I guess
@mattcowgill
Your statement "but feel free to look down on me like this if it makes you feel good, I guess" is just a bad, absolutely offensive claim, not at all worth elaborating
You seem to be arguing that heavy equipment shouldn't be used to dig a foundation of a house because people can use shovels as if the foundation of the house was the entire point of the construction project. Ultimately, someone wants to live in the house and the cost increases and time delays that digging by hand would entail are not going to be welcomed by those who would like to live in the house even if someone claims that using the heavy equipment is somehow doing it wrong.
@ericjmorey
Thanks for your comment. I actually don't see that analogy fit, simply because in this particular case he is worried about R language as a whole just because there is a tiny chance that a small fraction of packages may in future goes unmaintained. If your practice is heavily dependent on heavy equipment, you should be worry about heavy equipment eather than being worried about universe and everything in it.
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