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Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions

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Re: Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions

#41

Post by alastairr »

cscheid wrote: post #40
alastairr wrote: post #39

The surprising thing to me is that it's taken as long as it has for CRAN to have this problem. As others have said, this is happening everywhere.

CRAN has very different social structures and culture than other languages' package repos. CRAN _will_ pull your package from the repository if you fail to play nice with all packages, for example. This is evidently controversial, but it's accepted practice and one possible explanation for why CRAN feels more cohesive than NPM or PyPI.

I remember the controversies well :) but I guess even their extra gating is starting to creak by the sounds of it.

Re: Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions

#42

Post by tylermw »

hadley wrote: post #38
dizhn wrote: post #34

CRAN is not a conventional package repo. Its audience is not really people who care about programming or software. It is a means to an end for them and slop is perfectly fine. The language itself is also very simple and has defaults that people don't even bother changing. For example the default output file name. It doesn't ask for an output file name when you save output. As a result of the above, it is full of pack…

CRAN is a weird universe, but not (just) for the reasons you mention. CRAN is still heavily human maintained which means that there's a high chance that an actual human will look at your packages (at least for your first package). This imposes a considerably higher barrier to entry than most package repos, and hence I suspect CRAN actually has a considerably lower percentage of slop.

Absolutely correct. CRAN takes down and rejects packages all the time for minor issues and violations of their rules and guidelines. And there are a lot of them: https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html

The fact that there is a human (and one with expertise in R) reviewing each incoming package makes pure vibe coded slop much, much harder to get approved.

Re: Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions

#43

Post by zippyman55 »

Mairoce wrote: post #26
nswizzle31 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn’t disagree more. The base packages are a complete mess. If R was subset to only the tidyverse 5 years ago then it wouldn’t have lost so much ground to Python in nearly all fields. Posit is obviously the only organization with the pull to do that, and I feel like they got pulled in 10 directions during the move to AI and trying to also support Python. R Shiny is dead too which sucks because reflex.dev just co…

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/formattin…

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.

Re: Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions

#44

Post by dizhn »

gnerd00 wrote: post #35
dizhn wrote: post #34

CRAN is not a conventional package repo. Its audience is not really people who care about programming or software. It is a means to an end for them and slop is perfectly fine. The language itself is also very simple and has defaults that people don't even bother changing. For example the default output file name. It doesn't ask for an output file name when you save output. As a result of the above, it is full of pack…

OK you are right but that is selective for an "overview". The attention to documentation has always been outstanding for substantial packages. The culture is to make many repetitive steps into one liner "magic" that sometimes is very very useful; lastly, the completeness of advanced statistical methods in standard libraries is real. ps- I do not like the R language at all myself, but to be fair there are reasons it i…

I only dipped into it a little bit while helping out a friend. It looked weird to me but I didn't mean to sound so negative. Sorry. I am sure it does get the job done or people wouldn't be using neither R nor the CRAN.

Re: Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions

#45

Post by Tarq0n »

Mairoce wrote: post #26
nswizzle31 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn’t disagree more. The base packages are a complete mess. If R was subset to only the tidyverse 5 years ago then it wouldn’t have lost so much ground to Python in nearly all fields. Posit is obviously the only organization with the pull to do that, and I feel like they got pulled in 10 directions during the move to AI and trying to also support Python. R Shiny is dead too which sucks because reflex.dev just co…

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/formattin…

Data.table is a masterclass in bad API design. Its lack of success despite its technical merits is entirely of their own doing.

Re: Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions

#46

Post by Mairoce »

tylermw wrote: post #37
Mairoce wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/formattin…

> 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-…

> 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

Re: Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions

#47

Post by nxobject »

colechristensen wrote: post #28
jdw64 wrote: post #2

People would typically choose based on CRAN TaskViews or follow conventional methodologies, but what I notice from this is that R is truly a language used only by those who use it. And the people who use it are usually master's students or professors; it's rarely used at the undergraduate level. So even those with that level of academic background and training must have had their own implementation roadblocks. Could…

A considerable amount of work for grad students is answering the question: "How the f#$% do I get this code to compile and run" Some other researcher, often with limited skills in your native tongue, even more limited skills in software development best practices, wrote some code for a paper between 5 and 50 years ago and your PI has told you to use that code and some OTHER code together at the same time to validate…

The other half is: "What combination of packages and task views do I actually need to not reinvent the wheel for this particular type of analysis?"

Re: Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions

#48

Post by PaulHoule »

jdw64 wrote: post #31
PaulHoule wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some great stuff in R but from a software engineering level I'd much rather data scientists work in Python. At risk of sounding like ChatGPT, it's not an R thing, it's a general thing. Turn [showdead] on in your profile and see how Show HN is flooded with AI slop projects and we all know GitHub is drowning in it.

I also think Python is a bit better. (Though, unlike you, my programming skills are directly tied to my livelihood, so it benefits me if one language can cover as much ground as possible. Being locked into a specific domain just narrows the number of jobs I can take on.) You're not wrong, but it makes me pretty sad that all my homepage submissions are marked as 'showdead' and no one ever sees them. Maybe my submissio…

I've got a very Clark Kent kind of a job doing very ordinary work at a university unit which is authoritative in its domain and don't talk a lot about what I do there because the last thing I want to do is have people think my opinions have anything to do with my employer (and the second to last thing I want to do is post statements to that effect!)

I code Java and Javascript by day and mostly Python for my side projects because of the practicality. I've always been the guy who can finish projects that other people couldn't by attending to the essential details that everybody else feels entitled to ignore.

As for your problem you are making the classic mistake of repeatedly posting links to your blog and nothing but links to your blog. If you were finding articles from other sources and posting (say) 10% from your own blog you wouldn't be tripping up the filters.

Sure I seem to have a led a glamourous life of enterprise sales, industrial espionage and always being ready to write and give a talk in 48 hours if a TED speaker gets kidnapped but the reality I haven't had time to fix the busted Python packages that my autoposter depends on. I am way too busy transforming into a fox when I go down the elevator and casting glamours on people and I am always tell this witch that I am the familiar of that witch (and the other way around) but on the 6th floor they have no idea who they are dealing with.

Re: Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions

#50

Post by malshe »

buellerbueller wrote: post #21
dofm wrote: post #14

R slop. Oof. What an awful thing to imagine. It's already the programming language of choice for egregious abuses of good practice.

Conversely, it is the programming language of choice for people who don't assume that their expertise on one domain (data science) translates into expertise in the whole of human knowledge (as we often see among techbros generally and here specifically). As a working data scientist, I know I am not a computer scientist or a 10x engineer (hell, I am probably a 0.8x engineer), but that's not where my expertise is. My e…

Your comment reminds me of a techbro blog I came across a few years ago. He was an influential "data scientist" on Twitter with CS rather than stats/econometrics background. In this post, he literatlly used linear regression on a categorical dependent variable. He just relabeled the categories 1, 2, 3, etc. Worse, when people pointed out the problem to him, he couldn't understand what was wrong about it and started pushing back.

It's been a while so I don't remember any details. I don't go on Twitter/X as much as I used to in those days.

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