findGlobals() - Githubissues

SBOHVM / RPiR

The Reproducible Programming in R course, developed by the School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Glasgow.

https://sbohvm.github.io/RPiR/

GNU General Public License v3.0

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findGlobals() #322

Open soniamitchell opened 3 years ago

soniamitchell commented 3 years ago

Remove findGlobals() from the course or relegate it to console use only.

If we're advocating writing packages then devtools::check() is far more comprehensive, and can be used to debug a package since provides warnings and errors.
Interpreting these warnings and errors is a useful skill.
Adding additional code into function files makes me uncomfortable.
When not writing a package, if we focus more on debugging skills, students should be able to identify global variables themselves, consciously, rather than having a bit of copied and pasted code that means they don't need to think about it.

richardreeve commented 3 years ago

But devtools::check() is a horror... and history has told us that despite working on this for many years, many students still didn't learn to spot global variables.

soniamitchell commented 3 years ago

But it’s one of my favourite things in R 😆 Maybe we can relegate findGlobals() to the console then? And add a bit to the functions lesson for troubleshooting? So it’s more active and less copy and pasting / using functions we give them?

richardreeve commented 3 years ago

I think again it'll be the assert_no_globals() that we use instead... whether it's at the console or in a script is another question. By and large they don't seem to understand using the console!

soniamitchell commented 3 years ago

I'd be tempted to use 'findGlobals()' rather than 'assert_no_globals()' given that the latter is part of the RPiR package, which isn't something they want to be "carrying" with them once the course ends.

As for using the console, I think we really need to talk to the intro to R course, or else include this type of stuff in the introductory lecture / exercises.