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by _Wintermute 820 days ago
I think a lot of the problem is that R does everything it can to prevent people from writing modular code.

It doesn't have modules or namespaces, and the current fashion is for packages to use non-standard evaluation which adds friction to user's writing their own functions.
1 comments
t-kalinowski 820 days ago
R does have namespaces. Take a look at the NAMESPACE file found at the root of every R package, which defines the symbols and methods exported by the package.

Note for many R packages, the NAMESPACE file is autogenerated from roxygen docs: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/roxygen2/vignettes/n...

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_Wintermute 820 days ago
> which defines the symbols and methods exported by the package

Which are all dumped into the one single global namespace regardless if you want everything or not.

I can't remember the exact number, but tidyverse package imports literally thousands of things into your global namespace on package load, coupled with any other dependencies and you have a hell of a time figuring out where any function or constant came from.

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mjhay 820 days ago
Calling library() is kind of an antipattern in production R code. You can either call namespaced functions (like say dplyr::mutate()), or use roxygen.

https://roxygen2.r-lib.org/articles/namespace.html

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disgruntledphd2 820 days ago
Agreed but the GP isn't wrong. It's much much nicer to import a library with an alias in Python.
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