One of my take aways from last week’s EARL conference was that R is more and more growing out of its academic roots into the enterprise. And with that come some challenges, e.g. how do I ensure consistent and systematic access to a set of R packages in an organisation, in particular when one team is providing packages to others?
Two packages can help here: roxyPackage and miniCRAN.
I wrote about roxyPackage earlier on this blog.
Documenting code can be a bit of a pain. Yet, the older (and wiser?) I get, the more I realise how important it is. When I was younger I said ‘documentation is for people without talent’. Well, I am clearly loosing my talent, as I sometimes struggle to understand what I programmed years ago. Thus, anything that soothes the pain of writing and maintaining documentation must be good and should help me to better understand my ‘old me’ in the future.
John D. Cook gave a great talk about ‘Why and how people use R’. The talk resonated with me and highlighted why R is such a great tool for end user computing. A topic which has become increasingly important in the European insurance industry. John’s main point on why people use R is that R gets the job done and I think he is spot on.