Jupyter Notebooks are popular with data scientists. Microsoft even offers a free, hosted, “no-install” service for Python, R and F#. However, there are some downsides to notebooks—mostly to do with software engineering best practices. Joel Grus gave a provocative talk at JupyterCon 2018 entitled “I Don’t Like Notebooks”. Yihui Xie then followed up with a […]
Python tops programming language list
Python has topped the IEEE Spectrum list of top programming languages again this year—extending its lead in the process. The sources used to compiled the list cover contexts that include social chatter, open-source code production, and job postings. Obviously that list of sources isn’t an accurate reflection of what developers are doing day-to-day in organisations. […]
The 5 most downloaded R packages
DataCamp have published an article on the five R packages with the most (direct) downloads. This is based on their leaderboard. Packages 3-5 are currently swapping positions. As I write this (18 November 2016) the top five are dplyr devtools ggplot2 cluster foreign It’s notable that the list of the most popular packages is heavily […]
Sharing R code using R-Fiddle
If you want to share a snippet of R code with others—e.g. for teaching or to get help on Stack Overflow—consider using R-Fiddle. While gists are good for basic code sharing, R-Fiddle allows others to execute the code in place. You can even embed the code together with a working R console in blog posts […]
RStudio 1.0 released
RStudio have released version 1.0 of their eponymous R IDE. They are calling it their …biggest [release] ever! It certainly has a number of very significant features. Integrated support for Spark Spark and R are core tools for data scientists. While Spark has an R API, support for the machine learning libraries is lagging. So, […]