On debugging
My favorite advice on debugging is from Professor Norman Matloff: Finding your bug is a process of confirming the many things that you believe are true – until you find one that is not true.
On indexing operators and composition
In this article I will discuss array indexing, operators, and composition in depth. If you work through this article you should end up with a very deep understanding of array indexing and the deep interpretation available when we realize indexing is an instance of function composition (or an example of […]
Iteration and closures in R
I recently read an interesting thread on unexpected behavior in R when creating a list of functions in a loop or iteration. The issue is solved, but I am going to take the liberty to try and re-state and slow down the discussion of the problem (and fix) for clarity. […]
The magrittr monad
Monads are a formal theory of composition where programmers get to invoke some very abstract mathematics (category theory) to argue the minutia of annotating, scheduling, sequencing operations, and side effects. On the positive side the monad axioms are a guarantee that related ways of writing code are in fact substitutable […]
Using closures as objects in R
For more and more clients we have been using a nice coding pattern taught to us by Garrett Grolemund in his book Hands-On Programming with R: make a function that returns a list of functions. This turns out to be a classic functional programming techique: use closures to implement objects […]