teach clean code principles with examples in R

[czeildi]

Writing clean code is important for efficient work in every programming language. However, most of the resources available (at least what I encountered so far) contain examples in primarily object oriented languages making it less accessible for R programmers who are not software engineers.

Clean code makes it easier to collaborate, to avoid bugs and write working code faster. It also helps with understanding code written by others.

I envision a blog post series / bookdown with the relevant principles adopted from the Clean Code book with examples in R, focusing on every day R users and not necessarily those writing production R code. (i.e. do not mention error classes or R6 classes but focus on the most common use cases)

See:

• https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/cleanr/index.html
• Robert C Martin: Clean Code

[batpigandme]

Is there an online version of this book anywhere? I'd be curious to see what it's all about!

[czeildi]

@batpigandme afaik the book is not available for free but there's ebook version.

[czeildi]

We just held a workshop on this topic with @paljenczy at eRum 2018 and we created a cheatsheet which could be a starting point for a more in-depth material.

@hadley I also thought about differences and similarities with your styleguide book http://style.tidyverse.org For one part the styleguide seems to be a subset of the clean code topic. I think style as a more local thing and clean code (like organizing functions) as a more global topic which makes sense at a somewhat larger scale. But you also touch these topics, like in the section on function design here.

Actually I think that at the unconf I'd like to work on a project more about actual coding but outside the unconf I'd love to think more and possibly collaborate around this topic.

[hadley]

@czeildi I think your cheatsheet is a little too prescriptive; we should chat about it in person.

[czeildi]

Summary: discuss a book on clean code with examples in R focusing on analisys projects. Adapt principles from Robert C Martin's clean code book to R and functional programming. Possibly as an extension of tidyverse style guide (??)