This week in R (2025-01-10)

Happy Friday everyone and Happy New Year! Here's some news from the world of R this week:

• Mess Management: Jadey Ryan has recorded a video with accompanying blog post explaining how to automate folder management using the {fs} package. The tutorial has code snippets and explains how to manage common hurdles like different cases, file separators and extensions, and how to automate cleaning up a messy folder.
• How much R in R: Isabella Velásquez has written an article looking into how much of core R is written in R. The short post uses a shell script to look at the number of lines of code in each of the three languages that compose R (R itself, C and Fortran). How much of R do you think is R? Take a guess and check out Isabella's findings!
• Target Practice: Danielle Navarro has published a blog post looking into the popular {targets} package for analysis pipelines. The article looks at three different use cases for {targets} and shares some learnings around how to get the most out of it. I can safely say I'm starting to get excited about using it in some of my own projects now!
• Shiny Resolutions: Jakub Sobolewski has put together a list of learning resources for becoming a better engineer. The materials span across software engineering and design, test driven development and UI/UX design. There is a mix of websites, books and articles so I'd recommend browsing the list to see what you find useful.

• Did you know:?a common beginner mistake is overlooking R's partial argument matching - what would you expect to happen with the below? Why?

library(dplyr)

iris |>
  mutate(
         .a = Sepal.Width * 2,
         .b = Sepal.Width * 3,
         .c = Sepal.Width * 4,
         .d = Sepal.Width * 5
  )        

New versions:

• {ellmer} v0.1.0 - Hadley Wickham's (newly renamed) package for calling LLMs in R has been released to CRAN with various improvements.

• {collapse} 2.0.19 - bug fixes and a new developer-focussed vignette for developing with {collapse}.

I post updates like this every week so if you're interested feel free to follow. Comment below if there's something interesting you found out this week too!