Re:Big Book of R
by wodenokoto on Friday April 11, 2025 @01:12AM
(#43650696)
It's getting a lot better, but R in production was something companies 10 years ago would say "so we figured out a way".
The problem is pinning dependencies. So while an R analysis written using base R 20 or 30 years ago works fine, something using dplyr is probably really difficult to get up and running.
At my old work we took a copy of CRAN when we started a new project and added dependencies from then.
So instead of asking for dplyr version x.y, as you'd do ... anywhere, we added dplyr as it and its dependencies where stored on CRAN on this specific date.
We also did a lot of systems programming in R, which I thought of as weird, but for the exact same reason as you are saying for Python.
But R is really easy to install, so I don't see why you can't setup a step in your pipeline that does R - or even both R and Python. They can read dataframes from eachothers memory.
Re:Big Book of R
by adr1an on Sunday April 20, 2025 @06:21PM
(#43746938)
Posit offers cran snapshots on their public 'package manager' instance. It's a great resource indeed. Via the URL you can ask to use as a mirror and get the snapshot you desire ;)
The problem is pinning dependencies. So while an R analysis written using base R 20 or 30 years ago works fine, something using dplyr is probably really difficult to get up and running.
At my old work we took a copy of CRAN when we started a new project and added dependencies from then.
So instead of asking for dplyr version x.y, as you'd do ... anywhere, we added dplyr as it and its dependencies where stored on CRAN on this specific date.
We also did a lot of systems programming in R, which I thought of as weird, but for the exact same reason as you are saying for Python.
But R is really easy to install, so I don't see why you can't setup a step in your pipeline that does R - or even both R and Python. They can read dataframes from eachothers memory.