[BlindRUG] Inaugural Ihaka Lecture by Hadley Wickham

Godfrey, Jonathan A.J.Godfrey at massey.ac.nz
Thu Mar 9 07:23:21 UTC 2017


Hi all,

The inaugural Ihaka Lecture, "Expressing yourself with R", given by Hadley Wickham last night is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1POb5fx_m3I

I listened to this talk live last night. Hadley is a great speaker and the sound quality was pretty good. His was the first talk in a weekly series being held on Wednesday evenings NZ time. I don't really plan to pay as much attention to the following three talks, but Hadley is a key player in the R community and understanding why he does what he is doing does explain a lot.

To be honest, you'll need to understand a fair amount of computer science terminology to get the most out of it.
There are also a few bits where he asks the audience to look at some code and discuss with people around them, but for anyone who is going to do any development in R some of his ideas are definitely worth thinking about.
I might not use his packages day in day out, but the coding practices he promotes are consistent with the way I'm working. Certainly if all development in the R community was using his principles as rules I'd be getting a lot more done with my own package development. I find a lot of my headaches in developing anything within BrailleR come from legacy functionality that pre-dates what are now everyday computer science ideas.

The series is being called the Ihaka series as Ross Ihaka (the kiwi half of the duo that started R) is retiring from the University of Auckland. Ross will deliver the fourth and final talk in the series.

Cheers,
Jonathan




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