[HN Gopher] R packages for data science
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       R packages for data science
        
       Author : cl3misch
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2025-11-26 12:18 UTC (7 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tidyverse.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tidyverse.org)
        
       | svoit wrote:
       | The Tidyverse is solid. I sometimes wish I used R more in
       | industry because of how good it is.
       | 
       | IMO, R is kind of a syntactic Frankenstein otherwise.
       | 
       | Tidymodels also exists: https://www.tidymodels.org/
        
         | mscbuck wrote:
         | From what I saw in the latest "language" surveys or whatever, R
         | does seemingly seem to be making a slight comeback. I was
         | actually surprised at its place above Ruby, iirc. Again, not
         | that these surveys are the end-all-be-all, but I've also
         | started to see a lot more data science postings that have R or
         | Python be a requirement, where I feel like for a few years it
         | was ALL Python.
        
       | techsystems wrote:
       | Use tidytable Much faster, exact same syntax, much smaller member
       | usage
        
       | mushufasa wrote:
       | To pre-empt critics of R, remember: R is a lisp!
        
         | UniverseHacker wrote:
         | But with a much more human legible syntax that doesn't require
         | huge numbers of nested parentheses.
        
           | tetris11 wrote:
           | `+`(1,2)
           | 
           | is a valid R call for anyone wondering
        
             | vharuck wrote:
             | So is this:                   `(`(1)
             | 
             | Bonus points: Find a use for having the parenthesis be a
             | function.
        
               | mc_maurer wrote:
               | Sneaking some very devious stuff into a friend's
               | .Rprofile when they're not looking
        
       | parsimo2010 wrote:
       | I almost wish Hadley had forked R to make the tidyverse. What I
       | usually see are people that start using tidy functions and coding
       | style, but at some point they realize they don't know how to do
       | something the tidy way or something hasn't been implemented in a
       | tidy package yet, so they fall back to base R.
       | 
       | Imho, transitioning from tidy to base R makes your code less
       | readable than just using base R throughout.
       | 
       | If the tidyverse were forked and base R functions weren't
       | available then people would be forced to come up with a different
       | solution and maybe they would stay committed to being tidy. I
       | realize that probably won't ever happen, there is too much work
       | to reimplement all the missing base R functions.
        
         | Fomite wrote:
         | This. They're basically two languages sitting on top of each
         | other. It's fascinating seeing students who have been taught
         | using the tidyverse try to switch gears.
        
         | jghn wrote:
         | > I almost wish Hadley had forked R to make the tidyverse
         | 
         | I am pretty sure there are R-core members who also wish this is
         | what happened.
        
           | bachmeier wrote:
           | As someone that's been using R for 20 years, I don't
           | necessarily wish that had happened, but I think the trend to
           | teach intro R using the tidyverse is a bad development.
           | People that use the tidyverse don't realize that it's
           | complex. There are no doubt complex and frustrating parts of
           | base R. For the most basic things, base R is natural. The
           | tidyverse has you piping and using advanced concepts from the
           | start.
        
         | greazy wrote:
         | Absolutely not.
         | 
         | Theres more to the R ecosystem than tidyverse packages. There's
         | a whole suite of absolutely amazing R packages in the
         | bioconductor ecosystem that rival tidyverse in speed and ease
         | of use but targeting other data structures.
         | 
         | Some of the tidyverse packages are over kill and contain lots
         | of foot guns.
         | 
         | I've seen code that was clean get butchered because someone had
         | no idea how to do something basic in base R.
         | 
         | There's also another separate ecosystem for doing stats with
         | their own flavors.
        
         | t_mann wrote:
         | There's a school of thought of using mostly base R, for all its
         | flaws it already had before Hadley, and selectively using some
         | tidyverse packages. Base R has been the de-facto coding
         | standard for academic statisticians for decades, with all the
         | wealth of open source packages that that entails, and some of
         | the tidyverse packages are just a godsend. ggplot2 is probably
         | the most powerful plotting library I've seen, while being
         | fairly accessible. You don't have to subscribe to an entire
         | philosophy for data wrangling or plotting (and may even frown
         | at the syntax overloading) to get a huge amount of utility out
         | of it.
        
       | tanvach wrote:
       | A plug for tidyverse adjacent data.table - really should be
       | combined someday :)
        
         | kgwgk wrote:
         | "Adjacent" as in "also available in R"?
        
       | realitychk9 wrote:
       | is R still a thing? thought the debate was settled in 2010
        
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       (page generated 2025-12-03 23:00 UTC)