A while ago (2019 seems so long ago now) I started working on something I
thought was interesting but which never really got any traction. It has
potential once more, so it’s about time I wrote up what it does and why I think
it’s a useful idea. I’m going to talk about using the {dplyr} package on some
data with rows and columns, but we’re not talking about data.frame
s or
tibble
s…
{charcuterie} - What if Strings Were Iterable in R?
I’ve been using a lot of programming languages recently and they all have their quirks, differentiating features, and unique qualities, but one thing most of them have is that they handle strings as a collection of characters. R doesn’t, it has a “character” type which is 0 or more characters, and that’s what we call a “string”, but what if it did have iterable strings?
[Read More]Let's Talk About the Weather
First, we'll need data!
A while ago I made some plots I really liked, but I never made a blog post about them. Then the data source stopped working and I couldn’t make them again. Now there’s a new data source, so it’s time for a post about some weather data!
[Read More]Constructing HTML with Functional Functions
I heard that learning Elm is a good way to approach learning Haskell, so I gave it a go and was surprised early on about an approach to writing abstracted HTML. In this post I compare the way that R and Elm generate HTML and the differences between their approaches.
[Read More]Digits Dilemma
Another day, another short riddle to be solved with several programming languages! This one is nice because solving it doesn’t need a lot of code, but it uses some interesting aspects of evaluation.
[Read More]Iterative Square Root
I saw a toot celebrating a short, clean implementation of a square root finding algorithm and wanted to dig a bit deeper into how it works, with a diversion into some APL.
[Read More]I Patched R to Solve an Exercism Problem
With a serious yak shaving deviation, I have a really short “cheat” solution to one of the featured Exercism problems. It’s been a really insightful journey getting to this point, and as always I’ve learned a lot along the way. The fact that I was able to understand the required changes and propose them is thanks to the open-source nature of programming languages.
[Read More]Advent of Array Elegance (AoC2023 Day 7)
I’m solving Advent of Code this year using a relaxed criteria compared to last year in that I’m allowing myself to use packages where they’re helpful, rather than strictly base R. Last year I re-solved half of the exercises using Rust which helped me learn a lot about Rust. This year I’m enamored with APL, and I wanted to share a particularly beautiful solution.
[Read More]Advent of Code 2022
In the lead up to Christmas each year, Advent of Code offers a series of 25 puzzles which start out reasonably simple, but get progressively harder, eventually requiring knowledge of algorithms and dynamic programming techniques. Last year I solved these in (strictly) base R on the day they were released (or as close to as I could). I then (starting Dec 27) went back and re-solved (13 of) them in Rust.
This post details what I learned along the way and some fun visualisations I made.
[Read More]Print Debugging (Now with Icecream!)
Print debugging has its place. Sure, it’s not always the best way to debug something, but it can often be the fastest. In this post I describe a useful way to do this in Rust and how we can get similar behaviour in R.
[Read More]