The proof is in the pudding. Every single grad student of mine that was brought up on the tidyverse produces gigantic R markdown files with 20 imports to accomplish something that would be shorter and much much easier to understand (and review!) with a base package or with one of a small number of packages (box, data.table) designed by people who understand programming.
Not to mention the ridiculous styling/formatting of most tidyverse users, which Wickham and others seem to promote. One of the reasons R has lost ground to other languages recently is that most R code these days is ugly
Data.table is a masterclass in bad API design. Its lack of success despite its technical merits is entirely of their own doing.
That was always my struggle w tidyverse vs base mastery. From the looney tunes cartoon of the road runner vs the coyote, the coyote used tidyverse and the road runner used base R.
> The proof is in the pudding. Every single grad student of mine that was brought up on the tidyverse produces gigantic R markdown files with 20 imports to accomplish something that would be shorter and much much easier to understand (and review!) with a base package or with one of a small number of packages (box, data.table) designed by people who understand programming.
The fact that young people are producing sub-optimal code (in terms of whatever optimization criteria you are choosing--here, it sounds like terseness) is not strong evidence that a particular software ecosystem (tidyverse) is flawed. Young people producing bad code is not surprising. They're your grad students, mentor them, and maybe they'll adapt to your ways of thinking. Or not.
> One of the reasons R has lost ground to other languages recently is that most R code these days is ugly
Citation needed, surely. The fact that this article is about an increase in the number of CRAN submissions and pseudo-quantitative indices like the TIOBE index show R's slice of the pie is growing provides evidence to the contrary.
> Young people producing bad code is not surprising. They're your grad students, mentor them, and maybe they'll adapt to your ways of thinking. Or not.
You’re right, mentorship is key and I do my best to suggest better practices. They are often quite happy to find out they can do more with less and can forget having to remember multiple additional syntaxes (looking at you “ggplot2”).
I somewhat understand why R instructors lean towards the tidyverse - Wickham’s group produces a ton of tutorials and workbooks, so it’s easy to just point students there - but it has led to entire cohorts of people producing poor code
For doing "more with less" in graphics, I would rather learn a unique syntax for a package that is based on the grammar of graphics (ggplot2) than use a package with standard syntax and some other foundation.
Good you find value in that framework, but it doesn’t seem like a useful starting point for first time R learners interested in plotting and exploring their data. I have a colleague that integrates ggplot2 and other tidyverse packages into their undergraduate classes and they struggle quite a bit with creating basic plots since they now have to learn two things instead of one.