Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

bookdown.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

#51

Post by porker »

nojito wrote: post #39
quantstats wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on what you mean by using it effectively? I've just started using RStudio and any tips/ways to use it more efficiently are welcome! Thanks.

Find a business problem in your job that requires information to get into the hands of many people but require tweaks between them. i.e. person X needs to know A but person Y needs to know B. Read up the section on parameterized reports and realize you can do the work of dozens . https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/parameterized-reports.h... rmarkdown is insanely effective at getting information out of your hands an…

> Read up the section on parameterized reports and realize you can do the work of dozens.

This was the killer (visual) feature in LyX when I used it to author LaTeX documents. Great to hear rmarkdown has similar support.

Re: R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

#53

Post by valarauko »

JHonaker wrote: post #37
jcheng wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I’m with RStudio. We generally treat “working in RStudio but not elsewhere” as serious bugs, especially in our open source R packages. Not only because we don’t want to artificially limit usage of other interactive environments, but because a lot of what people do with R is run their code in non-interactive settings like CI/CD pipelines or ETL jobs. (Actually, an R Markdown compilation is a particularly good exam…

I actually use Emacs to author R Markdown and the exporting works pretty flawlessly. Before anyone asks, I use Org Mode. I just don't feel like pushing that format on my co-workers. If it's for me only, I use Org. If it's for a collaboration or export into a report, it goes into an R Markdown file.

Curious: how does Org-Mode compare with RMarkdown's use case? I'm only tangentially familiar with both. I've had the hardest time getting into Emacs (Doom-Emacs), and while Org-Mode seems great, the benefits seem to come entirely from Emacs, not the syntax.

I used markdown + pandoc to write my PhD thesis, but was forced to resort to latex for any formatting that was even slightly complicated (ie, multifigure plots, tables, etc).

Re: R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

#54

Post by valarauko »

minimaxir wrote: post #32
phillc73 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for finding alternatives to RStudio's dominance in the R space. No doubt they do some excellent things, but I also have a vague uneasiness at the cultishness surrounding some of their products. It sometimes feels like if you're not using the 'tidyverse', you're viewed as doing it wrong. Anyway, this feeling set me off on an exploration of alternative tools and packages. Instead of rmarkdown I'm now exploring…

As someone who learnt R before tidyverse was a thing, I would have quit R a long time ago without the tidyverse. Base R is that much of a pain.

I also learnt R before tidyverse was a thing (2007), and eventually abandoned it for Python & Pandas a year before tidyverse came out. I sorely missed ggplot, but I couldn't justify the ugliness of R to make up for it. Now when I look at R code, it's almost always tidyverse, and makes little sense to me.

I'll probably move to Julia at some point.

Re: R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

#55

Post by StarlaAtNight »

Tarq0n wrote: post #43
jdgoesmarching wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently working on a DA masters with a background in markdown and was so happy to discover this. Then I was baffled to discover that there wasn’t an equivalent for Python. Jupyter is great, but I really love the simplicity of my text files and I’m surprised that there isn’t a major implementation given how popular both markdown and Python are. I guess notebooks are just too appealing.

Honestly jank and bad ergonomics pervade the Python data science ecosystem. The pandas API is kind of bad (multi-indexes anyone?) matplotlib is way too low level, tensorflow is a shitshow. I think the R community got lucky with a greater focus on user experience, even if it comes at the cost of explicitness sometimes (lots of DSL's with a lot of 'magic').

it was pretty wild to hear Hadley Wickham invoke Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in his most recent rstudio::conf keynote - dude is super in tune with how humans use open source data analysis tools

Re: R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

#56

Post by yihui »

data_ders wrote: post #44

This is the first HN thread about R where I don’t see a commenter shitposting about how “terrible” R is. Maybe that’s a testament to all the great work done by the great Yihui Xie and the RStudio folks. Currently using RStudio to write my masters papers in markdown and convert them to PDF. Love it!

Thanks for the kind words (about me and RStudio)!

Well, you might be too optimistic about people not commenting on R. Usually I tend to avoid reading HN, but I feel pretty much every single time when someone brings up anything related to R, some people will start mentioning how terrible R is, sooner or later :) Now people also start fighting around Tidyverse, although I have no idea why that's relevant to R Markdown...

Re: R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

#57

Post by yihui »

StarlaAtNight wrote: post #52

github really needs to add R Markdown Notebook rendering support (that's the ones that end in extension .nb.html)

We have tried for almost four years without success: https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/issues/1020 We did hear back from Github for a few times, but there has been no sign of progress at all. We will truly appreciate it if anyone can connect us to a Github contact to push this forward.

Re: R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

#58

Post by yihui »

mespe wrote: post #10
minimaxir wrote: post #5

R Markdown/Notebooks, IMO, has evolved to be the key value proposition of RStudio over the years. From a productivity standpoint when both working with R and publishing pretty reports/PDFs it has been incredible. (that said, if VS Code gets more robust R Markdown support, I may consider switching from RStudio) I wrote a blog post a few years ago comparing R Markdown/Notebooks to Jupyter Notebooks: https://minimaxir.c…

Funny thing is this has actually motivated me to move away from using rmarkdown. To the point that I went "backwards" and wrote several reports and an academic paper in Sweave after using rmarkdown for years. My primary motivation was that I needed to know the documents could be built by any R session, not just from within RStudio. I didn't want to be in a situation where my "reproducible" document relied on a specif…

I'm one of the main developers of R Markdown. As @jcheng said, it is definitely not our intention to lock you in RStudio for any of our R packages. You probably can't imagine how hard I have been trying to avoid relying on RStudio specifically for certain features. There are decisions that I can definitely make in favor of the RStudio IDE, but usually I don't do that, and hope things also work well with other editors. Pretty much everything you do in the RStudio IDE for R Markdown documents or projects can be done in command line. It's not possible that a document is no longer reproducible just because you stop using RStudio.

Re: R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

#59

Post by yihui »

phillc73 wrote: post #23
mespe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny thing is this has actually motivated me to move away from using rmarkdown. To the point that I went "backwards" and wrote several reports and an academic paper in Sweave after using rmarkdown for years. My primary motivation was that I needed to know the documents could be built by any R session, not just from within RStudio. I didn't want to be in a situation where my "reproducible" document relied on a specif…

I'm all for finding alternatives to RStudio's dominance in the R space. No doubt they do some excellent things, but I also have a vague uneasiness at the cultishness surrounding some of their products. It sometimes feels like if you're not using the 'tidyverse', you're viewed as doing it wrong. Anyway, this feeling set me off on an exploration of alternative tools and packages. Instead of rmarkdown I'm now exploring…

To be honest, I can feel the "cultishness" you mentioned, but I'm curious if you also feel that for R Markdown products (which are mostly irrelevant to Tidyverse). If you do, I'd love to try my best to fix that, because that's something that I personally don't like. I want to make it clear that if you don't use R Markdown, you are definitely not doing anything wrong, e.g., LaTeX and HTML are totally legitimate and supported:

https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/latex-hardcore...

https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/html-hardcore....

Re: R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

#60

Post by bigfudge »

stilisstuk wrote: post #34
bigfudge wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me part of the cultish ness is justified because I have to teach about 100 non programmers to use R and rmd every year. Tidyverse solves the big problem that R used to have was that there were hundreds of ways to do things, none of the functions had consistent naming or calling signatures and it was hard to Google sensible answers. Tidyvers is fast, consistent and has good docs. Pipes discourage lots of mutable s…

Hmmm... I've always found tideverse syntax inelegant. Data.table syntax does more with fewer different words. But it can get a bit convoluted. Any ways: there are different ways to solveing problems and writing code. Should we not encourage this? Otherwise it's just cargo cult again and again.

To a point. I’m actually a data table user too, but it’s actually a pain at the moment (and a good example of why tidyverse quality matters) because they broke the integration with reshape and made me rewrite a bunch of guides a while ago. I don’t like to encourage cargo cutting, but to some extent it’s needed as a beginner. Heck, we’re all still cargo culting to some degree unless you also understand the machine code.
Post reply on HN