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Showing posts from September, 2020

The Trouble with Tibbles

Obviously, tribbles are very perceptive creatures, Captain. ~ Spock (Leonard Nimoy) I find it more helpful to think of R as  having  a programming language than  being  a programming language.  ~  John D. Cook I use R quite frequentl and I often make use of the tidyverse  library. Tidyverse implements the "tidy" data philosophy. Tidy data sets are stored in tables where each row is an observation and each column is a variable. The tidyverse library, along with severl other tidy libraries, implements this idea in R.  To learn about tidyverse, the best place to start is  Garrett Grolemund and  Hadley Wickham's book R for Data Science . It's available online for free. What follows is not a tidyverse tutorial. There are plenty of those on the web. I want to point out few difficulties I have encountered while trying to parameterize tidyverse operations. Tibbles In the tidyverse library, the basic table data structure is the  tibbl...