Hacker News Reader

Comment by rankam | Hacker News Reader

Has the R core team publicly stated that they disagree with direction Wickham's Tidyverse is going? Genuinely asking as I love the Tidyverse, but would be interested to hear arguments against it.

View on HN

I am not sure why the original commenter said that tidyverse is more backwards-compatible compared with R core. It used to introduce breaking changes every 6 months or so.

Also they like it this way and promote it: https://twitter.com/hadleywickham/status/1175388442802479104

They still do.

I like the tidyverse, but Hadley's struggles with lazy evaluation and arguments has cost me lots and lots of time updating internal code at various workplaces.

Don't get me wrong, the tidyverse is great, but if I was writing R code that I expected to run without supervision for a long time, I'd avoid it as much as possible.

If you are looking for a faster, more concise alternative I highly recommend data.table.

perl is also very concise

There are more then enough ways to keep it going. This has been address by several tools.

Personally I have some tiddy code that is 8 years old and it still is working.

Yes, and I have plenty of it which does not.

Moving up to a major version (1.0) implies there could have been breaking changes if you follow semver. And including something like `unnest_legacy()` is helpful for people making the transition.

Just like `stringsAsFactors=FALSE` happened on a transition from 3.x to 4.x, because it is breaking, dplyr 1.0 had breaking changes.

Hadley is a member of the R foundation for what it's worth: https://www.r-project.org/foundation/members.html

R core and R foundation are different things: https://www.r-project.org/contributors.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com