[phillc73]

I'm all for finding alternatives to RStudio's dominance in the R space. No doubt they do some excellent things, but I also have a vague uneasiness at the cultishness surrounding some of their products. It sometimes feels like if you're not using the 'tidyverse', you're viewed as doing it wrong.

Anyway, this feeling set me off on an exploration of alternative tools and packages. Instead of rmarkdown I'm now exploring the pander[1] package, which seems to do most of what I'm looking for, perhaps only a little limited in output formats.

Edit: The Pandoc.brew examples might be most interesting from a direct alternative to rmarkdown for document creation context.[2]

[1] http://rapporter.github.io/pander/

[2] http://rapporter.github.io/pander/#examples

[bigfudge]

For me part of the cultish ness is justified because I have to teach about 100 non programmers to use R and rmd every year. Tidyverse solves the big problem that R used to have was that there were hundreds of ways to do things, none of the functions had consistent naming or calling signatures and it was hard to Google sensible answers. Tidyvers is fast, consistent and has good docs. Pipes discourage lots of mutable state which is a major cause of errors in non programmers code. I think if you are going to be sharing your code with other researchers and are not using tidyverse then These days I think you basically are doing it wrong.

[stilisstuk]

Hmmm... I've always found tideverse syntax inelegant. Data.table syntax does more with fewer different words. But it can get a bit convoluted. Any ways: there are different ways to solveing problems and writing code. Should we not encourage this? Otherwise it's just cargo cult again and again.

[bigfudge]

To a point. I’m actually a data table user too, but it’s actually a pain at the moment (and a good example of why tidyverse quality matters) because they broke the integration with reshape and made me rewrite a bunch of guides a while ago. I don’t like to encourage cargo cutting, but to some extent it’s needed as a beginner. Heck, we’re all still cargo culting to some degree unless you also understand the machine code.

[AuthorizedCust]

I teach a graduate course on R every year. One of my points on the Tidyverse is that it does an excellent job of providing clean and sound extensions to core language functionality. I emphasize how thoughtfully designed it is. It is a refreshing change from other languages, which feel more like a collection of random parts.

[yihui]

To be honest, I can feel the "cultishness" you mentioned, but I'm curious if you also feel that for R Markdown products (which are mostly irrelevant to Tidyverse). If you do, I'd love to try my best to fix that, because that's something that I personally don't like. I want to make it clear that if you don't use R Markdown, you are definitely not doing anything wrong, e.g., LaTeX and HTML are totally legitimate and supported:

https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/latex-hardcore...

https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/html-hardcore....

[minimaxir]

As someone who learnt R before tidyverse was a thing, I would have quit R a long time ago without the tidyverse.

Base R is that much of a pain.

[valarauko]

I also learnt R before tidyverse was a thing (2007), and eventually abandoned it for Python & Pandas a year before tidyverse came out. I sorely missed ggplot, but I couldn't justify the ugliness of R to make up for it. Now when I look at R code, it's almost always tidyverse, and makes little sense to me.

I'll probably move to Julia at some point.

[CornCobs]

Agreed. Tidyverse is a totally different language, even. And it's one that is consistent, easy to use and most importantly, it feels designed

Huge props to Hadley Wickham and whoever helps bring programming niceties to R's otherwise mostly non-programmer userbase