The R Quest: from Users to Developers

Abstract

R is not a programming language, and this produces the inherent dichotomy between analytics and software engineering. With the emergence of data science, the opportunity exists to bridge this gap, especially through teaching practices. Genesis: How did we get here? The article “Software Engineering and R Programming: A Call to Action” summarizes the dichotomy between analytics and software engineering in the R ecosystem, provides examples where this leads to problems and proposes what we as R users can do to bridge the gap. Data Analytic Language The fundamental basis of the dichotomy is inherent in the evolution of S and R: they are not programming languages, but they ended up being mistaken for such. S was designed to be a data analytic language: to turn ideas into software quickly and faithfully, often used in “non-programming” style (Chambers, 1998). Its original goal was to enable the statisticians to apply code which was written in programming languages (at the time mostly FORTRAN) to analyze data quickly and interactively for some suitable definition of “interactive” at the time (Becker, 1994). The success of S and then R can be traced to the ability to perform data analysis by applying existing tools to data in creative ways. A data analysis is a quest at every step we learn more about the data which informs our decision about next steps. Whether it is an exploratory data analysis leveraging graphics or computing statistics or fitting models the final goal is typically not known ahead of time, it is obtained by an iterative process of applying tools that we as analysts think may lead us further (Tukey, 1977). It is important to note that this is exactly the opposite of software engineering where there is a well-defined goal: a specification or desired outcome, which simply needs to be expressed in a way understandable to the computer.