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Comment by ngriffiths | Hacker News Reader

For me the appeal is less that tidyverse is great and more that the R standard library is horrible. It's full of esoteric names, inconsistent use and order of parameters, unreasonable default behavior, behavior that surprises you coming from other programming experience. It's all in a couple massive packages instead of broken up into manageable pieces.

Tidyverse is imperfect and it feels heavy-handed and awkward to replace all the major standard library functions, but Tidyverse stuff is way more ergonomic.

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I think the R standard library is quite excellent. It pretty much follows the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing right". The only exception being `reshape` which tries to do too many things, but it can usually be avoided. It isn't inconsistent. I think the problem is the lack of tutorials that explain how to use all the data manipulation tools effectively, because there are quite a lot of functions and it isn't easy to figure out how to use them together to accomplish practical things. Tidyverse may be consistent with itself, but it's inconsistent with everything else. Either you only use tidyverse, or your program looks like an inconsistent mess.

Honestly, it might partly be that I've used R somewhat irregularly and I put a lot of value in design choices that "make sense" and are easier to remember. I'm sure once you are intimately familiar with the whole base language you can be really happy and productive with it.

> I think the problem is the lack of tutorials that explain how to use all the data manipulation tools effectively, because there are quite a lot of functions and it isn't easy to figure out how to use them together to accomplish practical things.

Most languages solve this problem by not cramming quite a lot of functions in one package and using shared design concepts to make it easier to fit them together. I don't think tutorials would solve these problems effectively but I guess it makes sense that they affect newer users the most.

> Tidyverse may be consistent with itself, but it's inconsistent with everything else.

Yeah, totally agree and I really dislike this part.

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