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by phonebucket 1974 days ago
> For a new R user it seems so much simpler:

> 1. run "library(dplyr)" 2. Google "how to XYZ in dplyr" 3. ??? 4. Profit

I beg to differ here. There’s much to be said for using data.table and base R instead of the tidyverse.

This article is worth a read in my view: https://github.com/matloff/TidyverseSkeptic

1 comments

Yeah, NSE (non-standard evaluation) is really annoying to work with in dplyr/tidyverse codebases, and this definitely inhibits people from building on top of them.

They are an 80% solution for a lot of data analytic needs, but base-R is 100% the right choice if you want your code to run for a long time without needing updates.

I've never really gotten into data.table for some reason, normally dplyr is fast enough, or I'm using something more efficient than R.