May 15, 2018 @ eRum Budapest

R and Me: How I got envolved

  • History of R has been well described on Wikipedia
  • notably its ref. [19] :
  • I became involved in 1993;
  • 1995: R became Free Software (licenced by GPL. FOSS:= Free and Open-Source),
  • … have been part of the R Core team since its formation in 1997.

R is made by R Core Team

R – made by R Core Team

https://www.r-project.org/contributors.html

… Since mid-1997 there has been a core group with write access to the R source, currently consisting of

Douglas Bates John Chambers Peter Dalgaard Robert Gentleman Kurt Hornik
Ross Ihaka Tomas Kalibera Michael Lawrence Friedrich Leisch Uwe Ligges
Thomas Lumley Martin Maechler Martin Morgan Paul Murrell Martyn Plummer
Brian Ripley Deepayan Sarkar Duncan Temple Lang Luke Tierney Simon Urbanek

plus Heiner Schwarte up to October 1999, Guido Masarotto up to June 2003, Stefano Iacus up to July 2014, Seth Falcon up to August 2015, and Duncan Murdoch up to September 2017.

R == "base" + packages

R : became "viral" thanks to CRAN's package system (Kurt Hornik and CRAN team):

R Programming

1. The ART of R Programming

Learn from the Masters

Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker: "Use the Force, Luke!" ('Starwars')

Use the Source!

Read R Source code (to learn from the Masters)

  1. Instead of just "googling" and installing the package: Learn to "Use the source!" (a small effort, yes…): see Jenny Brian's https://github.com/jennybc/access-r-source

  2. Download the R source, and package sources instead of just installing them.
    • CRAN (and Bioconductor) should be your primary source,
    • everthing else (github, …) only if you know that the authors and the website are trustworthy

  3. Do read package sources, even before you write your first package. Hence, start to love files such as <mypkg>_<n.m>.tar.gz

R Programming

2. R Programming with STYLE

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