`+`(1,2)
is a valid R call for anyone wondering `(`(1)
Bonus points: Find a use for having the parenthesis be a function.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.
I am pretty sure there are R-core members who also wish this is what happened.
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.
Tidyverse standalone would be borderline useless, as most of what it's best at is manipulating, transorming, and re-arranging your data in various ways. You still need to _do_ something with your data at the end, at which point, the entire rest of the R ecosystem comes into play.
Tidyverse is valuable specifically because it's the best at doing what it does, and what it does makes everything else easier, more legible, and faster.
Forking it would simultaneously make both R and tidyverse worse off.
What? The main tidyverse packages are popular because they are different from base R. If the packages duplicated base R functionality and usage was the same then nobody would use them.
> You still need to _do_ something with your data at the end, at which point, the entire rest of the R ecosystem comes into play.
This is exactly my point. You could use tidymodels or any number of packages to keep your code tidy, but people just bail after wrangling their data a little and then their code is disconnected. You might as well have done all your data cleaning with base R if you were going to fit a model outside the tidyverse anyway.
This is as opposed to ggplot. Which legitimately seems like a completely different language. It looks, reads, and acts differently than base R plotting. It sticks out like a sore thumb, and, in my opinion, does not have enough functionality to justify the departure from standard R conventions. Which is why I don't use it.
As to restating your point: Your original comment combined with what you have said here makes me completely confused. The fact that people don't "stay" in the tidyverse is evidence that it is well integrated and _shouldn't_ be forked. You can use it for what it's good for, and then go use other things that are better at what they are doing.
If people regularly did the entire pipeline of import > data manipulation > data analysis and never left the tidyverse, then you would have an argument that it should be forked.
The fact that people dont do this is evidence that it belongs how it is: a package.
I don't really understand your comment about "disconnected". My code doesn't feel disconnected other than that different portions of it are doing different things. But then again, I also think that tidyverse functions don't look that different from base R functions (which, again, is not the same thing as being the same as already existent R functions).
Still feel a lot of enterprises and industries looked over its capabilities then.
With LLMs the challenge of R syntax is a little easier for data analysts to climb, especially the new ones.
svoit•2mo ago
IMO, R is kind of a syntactic Frankenstein otherwise.
Tidymodels also exists: https://www.tidymodels.org/
mscbuck•2mo ago