Hi, Hadley:
What about the encouragement to add unit tests, if only disguised
as examples?
I've found the unit tests to be a powerful tool to help improve
and maintain the quality of packages to which I contribute. To this
end, Sundar and I added a column "Autochecks" to the table of "Selected
Repositories" in the Wikipedia article on "Software repository"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_repository), and we describe it
briefly in the text introducing that table. I may expand that
discussion based on the reply from you and others, then try to contact
leaders for the different languages / repositories, asking them to
improve this discussion -- or send me comments to incorporate.
Best Wishes,
Spencer
On 6/16/2010 7:19 AM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
Hi Spencer,
I think it is the emphasis on documentation that makes the R
development process unique. Many other languages have equivalents to
CRAN and R-forge - few others require the attention to documentation
that R does.
Hadley
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 8:45 PM, Spencer Graves
<spencer.gra...@structuremonitoring.com> wrote:
Hello, All:
What thoughts might you have on "The R Software Package Development
Process"?
I'm looking for ideas, materials, references, and / or collaborators
for an article on this topic to be submitted to the Communications of the
ACM. My limited experience with other languages such as Matlab and Python
suggests that R may be fairly unique with CRAN and this accompanying package
development process -- and users of other languages might benefit from
emulating R in this regard. We have an immediate deadline of Sept. 15, when
Sundar and I are scheduled to speak on this topic for the San Francisco Bay
Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery.
So far my literature search for comparable capabilities for other
languages have produced essentially nothing comparable.(a) Sundar and I
added a section on "Selected Repositories" to the Wikipedia "Software
repository" entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_repository).
Thanks,
Spencer Graves
##################
(a) I have material discussed by Merijn de Jonge, Eindhoven University of
Technology on "Package-Based Software Development" at the 29th Euromicro
Conference (EUROMICRO'03),
Belek-Antalya, Turkey, September 01-September 06
(http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/EURMIC.2003.1231570).
I'm also familiar with material by Friedrich Leisch, Sundar and I on
"Creating R Packages" available as contributed documentation from CRAN.
--
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Operating Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph: 408-655-4567
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
