Notices tagged with rstats, page 5

new rstudio package hits it again in the #rstats world with simplified file caching. https://rstudio.github.io/pins/index.html

Where will all my beautiful boilerplate code go?

if (!file.exists("data/dataset.csv")) {download.file(.......)....

won’t be missed

I believe functions should do what they say on the box (and the help page), and not what some user hopes they might do by mind-reading.
-- Brian D. Ripley
R-help (November 2004) #Rstats

If anything, there should be a Law: Thou Shalt Not Even Think Of Producing A Graph That Looks Like Anything From A Spreadsheet.
-- Ted Harding (in a discussion about producing graphics)
R-help (August 2007) #Rstats

Bad English is the language of science.
-- Jan de Leeuw
JSS mailing list (February 2005) #Rstats

Getting flamed for asking dumb questions on a public mailing list is all part of growing up and being a man/woman.
-- Michael Watson (in a discussion on whether answers on R-help should be more polite)
R-help (December 2004) #Rstats

However, if you want to do this at all efficiently for a data frame, start with my solution not Uwe's [...]
-- Brian D. Ripley (in a second reply to a question related to data frame manipulations)
R-help (June 2004) #Rstats

Nothing exceeds like Excel.
-- Roger Koenker (in reply to a question why it takes so long to paste 19,000 lines of R code from Excel into R)
R-help (October 2008) #Rstats

Byron Ellis: If we wanted to be truly radical we'd just accept that graphics devices and event loops are just special cases of the connection and merge the whole thing, thus more-or-less reinventing CLIM. :-)
Anthony Rossini: Eventually, all programming languages grow up and become Lisp. (progress, progress, and more joyful progress on CLS).
Byron Ellis: Untrue! They may also become Smalltalk :-)
-- Byron Ellis and Anthony Rossini
R-devel (December 2005) #Rstats

My preference goes with the numbering scheme attributed to a tribe on some island in the Pacific which consists of a 'factor' with four levels: 'one', 'two', 'three', and 'lots'. Hence, I'd go with 'lots of R users'.
-- Dirk Eddelbuettel (in a discussion about trying to estimate the number of R users)
R-help (April 2004) #Rstats

If we put in a function into rstan that dropped chains, people would use it.
-- Ben Goodrich (about (not) discarding selected chains from a stanfit object)
Stan-users (December 2016) #Rstats

No matter how much progress is made by the developers of screen readers somehow PDF remains less than accessible. It's a bit like a failed relationship in which one partner tries to win the other back with expensive gifts.
-- Paul R. Stanley (in a discussion about text-to-speech processors for the benefit of blind users of LaTeX)
texhax mailing list (March 2009) #Rstats

Let's not kid ourselves: the most widely used piece of software for statistics is Excel.
-- Brian D. Ripley ('Statistical Methods Need Software: A View of Statistical Computing')
Opening lecture RSS 2002, Plymouth (September 2002) #Rstats

In real life, be very careful before denigrating a child to its mother or father... so calling a something a bug in R which is none, is evoking feelings among R's parents... ;-)
-- Martin Maechler (after a package author reported a bug in R that was actually a bug in his own code)
R-devel (May 2015) #Rstats

It's not meant for sampling weights. It's meant for precision weights. How best to include sampling weights in mixed models is a research problem at the moment, but you can rely on getting the wrong answer if you just use the weights= argument.
-- Thomas Lumley (in reponse to a question about specifying sampling weights in lme4)
R-help (January 2012) #Rstats

The wiki spamming is a serious problem, [...]. What does a logfile with IPs help? The spammers are strangers selling viagra. I don't want to find them :-)
-- Detlef Steuer (in a discussion on R wikis)
R-help (January 2006) #Rstats

Personally I have never regretted trying not to underestimate my own future stupidity.
-- Greg Snow (explaining why eval(parse(...)) is often suboptimal, answering a question triggered by the infamous fortune(106))
R-help (January 2007) #Rstats

Obviously I have not tested on an Alphabc...tuvwxyz system but it should work there.
-- Brian D. Ripley (after fixing a problem discovered when compiling R 2.0.0 on Linux Alpha)
R-devel (October 2004) #Rstats

For quite a while, bug-for-bug compatibility with S-PLUS v 3.x was considered important to allow people to port their packages between systems.
-- Peter Dalgaard
R-help (February 2009) #Rstats

Oops. Was that what I was expecting?
-- Louise Matthews (during the practicals of 'Statistical Practice in Epidemiology Using R')
SPE Course, Tartu (May 2005) #Rstats

As for elegance, R is refined, tasteful, and beautiful. When I grow up, I want to marry R.
-- Andy Bunn (in a discussion about whether R is simple, powerful and elegant)
R-help (May 2005) #Rstats