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Hadley Wickham
Personal blog · adv-r.had.co.nzprogrammingdata
Hadley Wickham writes Welcome · Advanced R., a personal blog at adv-r.had.co.nz about programming and data. Since 2013, 41 different Hacker News readers have linked it 64 times, most often “Advanced R by Hadley Wickham”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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64mentions?
41HN people?
2013–2025first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- Advanced R by Hadley Wickham14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2013-09-22
- Advanced R programming5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-11-17
- /Computing-on-the-language.html5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-05-13
- Build Domain specific languages in R3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-24
- /OO-essentials.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-02-06
- /Data-structures.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-24
- /Functional-programming.html2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-12-02
- /Exceptions-Debugging.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-02
- /Performance.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-08-06
- Advanced R Progamming by Hadley Wickham2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-02-06
What Hacker News says?
I think GitHub is being more popular among "non-developers" because version control is beneficial for all sorts of projects. My favorite example of a "non-programming" project is Hadley Wickham's Advanced R book ( http://adv-r.had.co.nz ) which is hosted on GitHub and powered by Jekyll, knitr, and pandoc. I hope more authors decide to publish this way.
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on “Open Guide to Equity Compensation”Submitted Advanced R programming as a story · 173 points
HN discussionA clearer explanation is the lazy evaluation here: http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Functions.html#function-arguments I can pass an argument but R won’t try to evaluate unless it needs it. This can be beneficial when only some of a function’s branches need the argument. You can pass a solver for the traveling salesman problem but R won’t waste CPU cycles until it reaches a point where it has to solve the TSP to get an answer.…
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on “Apache Arrow and the “Things I Hate About Pandas””Submitted Advanced R by Hadley Wickham as a story · 116 points
HN discussion> Examples include converting boxplots into violins or vice versa, turning a line plot into a heatmap, plotting a density estimate instead of a histogram, performing a computation on ranked data values instead of raw data values, and so on. Most of this is not about Python, it’s about matplotlib. If you want the admittedly very thoughtful design of ggplot in Python, use plotnine > I would consider the R code to be s…
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on “Python is not a great language for data science”Submitted Advanced R by Hadley Wickham as a story · 13 points
HN discussionOne really underappreciated aspect of R is that it's a lisp at heart. This enables the user (and enterprising package writer) to build really clean abstractions for the task at hand. The tidyverse suite of Hadley Wickham is a great example of this, notably with the pipe operator %>% (similar to |> in F#) which is not part of the base language and yet could be very easily implemented. Julia's macros probably enables…
Comment linking /Expressions.html
on “Introduction to R Programming”Submitted Advanced R as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHadley Wickham also has an Advanced R book [0] which has some of the functional programming concepts that you can use in R [0]: http://adv-r.had.co.nz/
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on “Introduction to R Programming”Submitted Advanced R programming by Hadley Wickham as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYes there is a really great statistics functional programming language that was founded on being a scheme for data science. Unfortunately the data scientist back then were not training in doing code well so the examples of the language got cluttered up but there is a great functional Scheme right in there. That language is R. http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Functional-programming.html I learned Racket (Lisp) and then realize…
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on “Chicken Scheme 5.0”Submitted In-progress book site for "Advanced R development" as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI think you're wrong. R is an excellent language, targeted specifically around the problems you commonly see when doing data analysis. On the whole the standard libraries aren't particularly good, but I think the language is good. That said, the language is often taught poorly. Here's my attempt to do better: http://adv-r.had.co.nz
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on “Comparison – R vs. Python: head to head data analysis”Submitted Build Domain specific languages in R as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDoes anyone have a short list of the best sites to learn R? I only have two on my list, and one is for advanced users: http://adv-r.had.co.nz - Advanced R by Hadley Wickham https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/r/ I keep my links on Github: https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages/blob/master/r.o...
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on “Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio”Submitted Advanced R Progamming by Hadley Wickham as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNo squinting needed :) "R, at its heart, is a functional programming (FP) language. This means that it provides many tools for the creation and manipulation of functions. In particular, R has what’s known as first class functions. You can do anything with functions that you can do with vectors: you can assign them to variables, store them in lists, pass them as arguments to other functions, create them inside functi…
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on “Why I Still Use Python for High Performance Scientific Computing”Submitted Advanced R – By Hadley Wickham as a story · 1 points
HN discussionDoesn't seem like it will prevent you from doing Language Oriented Programming, or advanced embedded Domain Specific Languages. Perhaps it's less ergonomic, I am not an R user. http://adv-r.had.co.nz/dsl.html
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on “Why Lisp?”EDIT: i gotta admit, you sound like you've got more experience with teaching R than me. so perhaps my opinions here are a bit strong for what they're based on, i.e. tutoring a couple of non-programmer friends and my own learning process. still... > My experience is that this weird evaluation order stuff is only confusing for students with a lot of programming experience who already expect nice lexical scope fair poi…
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on “Why do we use R rather than Excel?”You highlight four issues: 1. Documentation is accessible via the interpreter. You can type ?funcname to get documentation or ?libname for the entry point for almost every library, or use the Help tab in RStudio, the most common interpreter. Package documentation is typically hyperlinked text and of a high quality. You can also see syndicated versions of library documentation online in HTML format. Here is for insta…
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on “Why do we use R rather than Excel?”You might enjoy < http://adv-r.had.co.nz/> , which discusses R from more of a programming language perspective (albeit a programming language that is chiefly used for data analysis). There are a lot of misunderstanding about R the language.
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on “R for Data Science”In my opinion the majority of code in R is extremely well suited to its domain. That means it does not look like the python code you are used to, and I'd recommend learning more about why R works the way it does, e.g. at http://adv-r.had.co.nz
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on “Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics”"R is based on S and Scheme" From 2009 mail list of R on the similarities and differences between R and Lisp https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-December/181982.h... R is much more functional then most people give it credit. From Saint Hadley > R, at its heart, is a functional programming (FP) language. This means that it provides many tools for the creation and manipulation of functions. In particular, R has…
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on “Racket v6.8”Here is my opinion on Python and R. I used Pandas and switched to R. 1) Python 0 based as opposed to 1 based is big to me. I don't want to always have to minus on on columns to call them. 2) I much prefer Hadley Wickham's syntax to Pandas which closely follows it, but R piping with %>% is amazing with library magritr. Using dplyr and stringr, tidyr, rvest, httr, luberdate are awesome and consistant. 3) In R I can us…
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on “An Introduction to Statistics with Python”As an aspiring R-learner, I have a few quibbles in the first pages I've looked at: re: the Assignment operator http://www.studytrails.com/R/Core/AssignmentOperator.jsp > However, there is a difference between the two operators. = is only allowed at the top level i.e. if the complete expression is written at the prompt. so = is not allowed in control structures. Here's an example: > if (aa=0) {print ("test")} Error:…
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on “15 Page Tutorial for R”some things require more understanding and experience, for no obvious benefit...in which case they're anti-patterns, or not best practice in language design. there are a lot of things in R that are good but it's an old language and there's a lot of cruft. like "R has three object oriented systems (plus the base types), so it can be a bit intimidating." http://adv-r.had.co.nz/OO-essentials.html and believe it or not,…
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on “R, the master troll of statistical languages (2012)”And Advanced R is also available for free at http://adv-r.had.co.nz/
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on “R, the master troll of statistical languages (2012)”This could change your life: http://adv-r.had.co.nz/
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on “R, the master troll of statistical languages (2012)”There are certain languages that are good for a first-time programmer. R, despite being one of the first languages a budding "data scientist" might want to use, is probably not one of them for the many reasons given, among them: - there are way too many ways to do everything - implicit iteration (although great for statistics) makes performance issues hard to spot - the data structures are a bit too flexible (it is…
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on “R, the master troll of statistical languages (2012)”
