[data-ottawa]

No other modern language will compete with R on ergonomics because of how it allows functions to read the context they’re called in, and S expressions are incredibly flexibly. The R manual is great.

To say pandas just copied it but worse is overly dismissive. The core of pandas has always been indexing/reindexing, split-apply-combine, and slicing views.

It’s a different approach than R’s data tables or frames.

[aidos]

> allows functions to read the context they’re called in

Can you show an example? Seems interesting considering that code knowing about external context is not generally a good pattern when it comes to maintainability (security, readability).

I’ve lived through some horrific 10M line coldfusion codebases that embraced this paradigm to death - they were a whole other extreme where you could _write_ variables in the scope of where you were called from!

[condwanaland]

Say I have a dataframe called 'penguins'

I can write code like: penguin_sizes <- select(penguins, weight, height)

Here, weight and height are columns inside the dataframe. But I can refer to them as if they were objects in the environment (I., e without quotes) because the select function looks for them inside the penguins dataframe (it's first argument)

This is a very simple example but it's used extensively in some R paradigms

[data-ottawa]

Yes, this exactly.

And its why you can do plot(x, sin) and get properly labelled graphs. It also powers the formula API that made caret and glm modules so easy to use.