tidyr VS ggplot2

tidyr

This was fun to play around with. I made some very minor changes and posted at https://gist.github.com/hadley/d54895557fbb0fe0402d2277b9011....

It revealed to me that there's a buglet in `forcats::last()` (https://github.com/tidyverse/forcats/issues/303) and made me wonder if `pivot_longer()` should be able to rename the columns as you pivot them (https://github.com/tidyverse/tidyr/issues/1338)

I originally wrote tidytable because dtplyr was missing a lot of functionality my coworkers and I needed, and at the time dtplyr looked like a "forgotten package" (lots of open issues/bugs, very infrequent updates). Hadley Wickham also mentioned at one point [he had no plans for adding tidyr functions)[https://github.com/tidyverse/tidyr/issues/1015#issuecomment-682977139]. He changed his mind on that one - tidyr functions are the ones that I'm in the process of contributing to dtplyr now.

Pardon me for shooting from the hip here, but IMO if you're using R for something radically different than statistical analysis and data visualization, there might be another tool/language that's more purpose-suited.

> As someone who basically uses R as a nice LISP-y scripting language to orchestrate calling low-level compiled code from other languages

When I read this, I think, would `bash` or something equally portable/universally installed work?

R is a beautiful thing when limited to its core uses (I use it every day ([0]). But in my experience, the more we build away from those core uses, the more brittleness we introduce. I wish the Posit team would focus on the core R experience, resolve some of the hundreds of open issues on its core packages in a timely way, [1,2] and just generally play to R's strengths.

[0] https://github.com/hsflabstanford/vegan-meta

[1] https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/issues

[2] https://github.com/tidyverse/ggplot2/issues

ggplot2

I got the list of five-letter words from the words package in R, created the QWERTY keyboard grid with base R and tibble, and visualized the data with geom_tile in the ggplot2 package.

Thanks, it's an interesting idea! I definitely could implement this with scale_fill_gradientn) in ggplot2.

I used the ggplot2 package in R to create these figures.

This might not be at the top of your list, but science fiction often presents advanced data analysis and visualization technologies. Open source data analysis tools such as Python's Pandas and R's ggplot2 have revolutionized the field, making complex data manipulation and visualization accessible to all. In the science fiction novel The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney uses a variety of data analysis and visualization tools to survive on Mars. He uses Python's Pandas to clean and organize data, and he uses R's ggplot2 to create visualizations of his data. These tools allow him to make sense of the vast amounts of data and help him to make critical decisions about his survival.