Author here; I think I understand where you might be coming from. I find functional nature of R combined with pipes incredibly powerful and elegant to work with.
OTOH in a pipeline, you're mutating/summarising/joining a data frame, and it's really difficult to look at it and keep track of what state the data is in. I try my best to write in a way that you understand the state of the data (hence the tables I spread throughout the post), but I do acknowledge it can be inscrutable.
A "pipe" is simply a composition of functions. Tidyverse adds a different syntax for doing function composition, using the pipe operator, which I don't particularly like. My general objection to Tidyverse is that it tries to reinvent everything but the end result is a language that is less practical and less transparent than standard R.
Why? The tidyverse is so readable, elegant, compositional, functional and declarative. It allows me to produce a lot more and higher quality than I could without it. ggplot2 is the best visualization software hands down, and dplyr leverages Unix’s famous point free programming style (that reduces the surface area for errors).
I disagree. In this example tidyverse looks convoluted compared to just using an array and apply. ggplot2 is okay but we already had lattice. Lattice does everything ggplot2 does and produces much better-looking plots IMO.
I like simplicity and I love a good base R idiom, but there's a lot less consistency in base R compared to the tidyverse (and that comes with a productivity penalty).
Lattice is really low-level. It's like doing vis with matplotlib (requires a lot of time and hair-pulling). Higher level interfaces boost productivity.
Author here; I think I understand where you might be coming from. I find functional nature of R combined with pipes incredibly powerful and elegant to work with.
OTOH in a pipeline, you're mutating/summarising/joining a data frame, and it's really difficult to look at it and keep track of what state the data is in. I try my best to write in a way that you understand the state of the data (hence the tables I spread throughout the post), but I do acknowledge it can be inscrutable.
A "pipe" is simply a composition of functions. Tidyverse adds a different syntax for doing function composition, using the pipe operator, which I don't particularly like. My general objection to Tidyverse is that it tries to reinvent everything but the end result is a language that is less practical and less transparent than standard R.
Can you rewrite some of those snippets in standard R w/o Tidyverse? Curious what it would look like
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Why? The tidyverse is so readable, elegant, compositional, functional and declarative. It allows me to produce a lot more and higher quality than I could without it. ggplot2 is the best visualization software hands down, and dplyr leverages Unix’s famous point free programming style (that reduces the surface area for errors).
I disagree. In this example tidyverse looks convoluted compared to just using an array and apply. ggplot2 is okay but we already had lattice. Lattice does everything ggplot2 does and produces much better-looking plots IMO.
I like simplicity and I love a good base R idiom, but there's a lot less consistency in base R compared to the tidyverse (and that comes with a productivity penalty).
Lattice is really low-level. It's like doing vis with matplotlib (requires a lot of time and hair-pulling). Higher level interfaces boost productivity.
the equivalent in any other language would be an ugly, unreadable, inconsistent mess.