Two Highlights from NY R Conference 2015

Saturday April 25, 2015

Here are the two things I thought were most interesting at NY R on Saturday April 25, 2015:

Joe Rickert showed Revolution Analytics' Managed R Archive Network (MRAN). It snapshots all of CRAN every day so that you can finally do a real lock-in of the versions for all your R dependencies, using the checkpoint package. This was announced a while ago, but it was new to me. I love any sort of data store that gives you as-of, even if it's just by snapshotting.

Wes McKinney spoke about data frame design and how such tooling should develop further. Here's a transcription of a key slide:

• The Great Data Tool Decoupling™
  • Thesis: over time, user interfaces, data storage, and execution engines will decouple and specialize
  • In fact, you should really want this to happen
    • Share systems among languages
    • Reduce fragmentation and "lock-in"
    • Shift developer focus to usability
  • Prediction: we'll be there by 2025; sooner if we all get our act together

I've thought about this kind of decoupling for data visualization (see gog) and I think it's a cool direction in general.

There were certainly other interesting and good things as well!