Ah yes, the classic “Europe is in decline” narrative favored by Americans. You’d think after more than a decade of that nonsense, people would start to ignore it or at least question its assumptions. Nominal GDP and venture capital funding are not the only things that matter in an economy.
That’s a rather glib interpretation of what I said.
I’m being rather charitable when I call the tidyverse “user-friendly”. That might be the goal of tidyverse devs, but it hasn’t been the reality since inception.
The point is even if we assume it is or will eventually become user-friendly, are we willing to accept the trade-offs that come with that?
The core of the problem is that the tidyverse is trying to turn R into a user-friendly real-time calculator, rather than a tool for stable, deterministic, and literate data analysis.
Good you find value in that framework, but it doesn’t seem like a useful starting point for first time R learners interested in plotting and exploring their data. I have a colleague that integrates ggplot2 and other tidyverse packages into their undergraduate classes and they struggle quite a bit with creating basic plots since they now have to learn two things instead of one.
> Young people producing bad code is not surprising. They're your grad students, mentor them, and maybe they'll adapt to your ways of thinking. Or not.
You’re right, mentorship is key and I do my best to suggest better practices. They are often quite happy to find out they can do more with less and can forget having to remember multiple additional syntaxes (looking at you “ggplot2”).
I somewhat understand why R instructors lean towards the tidyverse - Wickham’s group produces a ton of tutorials and workbooks, so it’s easy to just point students there - but it has led to entire cohorts of people producing poor code
The proof is in the pudding. Every single grad student of mine that was brought up on the tidyverse produces gigantic R markdown files with 20 imports to accomplish something that would be shorter and much much easier to understand (and review!) with a base package or with one of a small number of packages (box, data.table) designed by people who understand programming.
Not to mention the ridiculous styling/formatting of most tidyverse users, which Wickham and others seem to promote. One of the reasons R has lost ground to other languages recently is that most R code these days is ugly
Frankly the bigger problem is an over reliance among R instructors on the tidyverse, an ever-expanding ecosystem of redundant functions and anti-patterns. They’re teaching new R users that everything can be solved with yet another package import and skipping over teaching them how to use the already powerful and intuitive base packages.