The Big R-Book

♣7♣Tidy R with the Tidyverse

7.1. The Philosophy of the Tidyverse

R is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), that implies that it is free to use, but also that you have access to the code – if desired. As most FOSS projects, R is also easy to expand. Fortunately, it is also a popular language and some of thesemillions of R users¹ might have created a packages and enhance R's functionality to do just what you need. This allows any R users to stand on the shoulders of giants: you do not have to re-invent the wheel, but you can just pick a package and expand your knowledge and that of humanity. That is great, and that is one of the most important reasons to use R. However, this has also a dark side: the popularity and the ease to expand the language means that there are literally thousands of packages available. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the variety and vast amount of packages available and this is also one of the key weaknesses of R.

Most of those packages will require one or more other packages to be loaded first. These packages will in their turn also have dependencies on yet other (or the same) packages. These dependenciesmight require a certain version of the upstreampackage. This package maintenance problem used to be known as the “dependency hell.” The package manager of R does, however, a good job and it usually will work as expected.

Using the same code again after a few years, is usually more challenging. In the meanwhile you might have updated R to a newer version ...