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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. […]

Some programming language theory in R

Let’s take a break from statistics and data science to think a bit about programming language theory, and how the theory relates to the programming language used in the R analysis platform (the language is technically called “S”, but we are going to just call the whole analysis system “R”). […]

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 […]