On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 08:14 -0600, hadley wickham wrote: > > And without wanting to be rude or anything, your opinion carries very > > little weight in a project like R. You've arrived on the list and been > > very critical of the work of others. Now there is nothing wrong with > > being critical if it is constructive, and additionally with something > > like R you need to be constructive *and* contribute back. I'm not saying > > You are holding Wacek to a very high standard. Why is not acceptable > to say that this part of R is hard to understand without having to > provide a better solution?
Ok, reading back I should have said if you want something fixed, patches are welcome. I didn't mean to say that to get help you had to contribute back. However, Wacek's approach was (and I'm paraphrasing): subset doesn't work logically or as I expect. It is a mess and needs fixing. I'm sure no-one on the list minds if people don't understand things and want to ask questions - I know I ask plenty of questions here about things I don't understand. But just as there is a posting guide that says how to go about phrasing a question that is likely to get a response, we don't need people denigrating the work of others whilst asking for assistance with what are admittedly hard concepts (ones I don't fully understand either). I've found several of these discussions involving Wacek's questions very enlightening at times; once you get past the "it doesn't work as I expect so is wrong" attitude. > > subset() _is_ confusing to novice R users. You can not anticipate > what subset(df, select = a) will do unless you know what variables are > defined in the local environment and what variables are defined in the > data frame. It is hard to understand how it works without a deep > understanding of environments and it is hard to teach all the special > cases. It is difficult to reliably use subset within another > function. I agree, but one can read the documentation for help. It isn't perfect and expects you know a bit (a lot) about environments etc, but I don't think it is too confusing if you know what is in df (otherwise how do you know what to select?), you read the help page and follow the examples. G > > This comes from my personal experience with subset (good for > interactive use, never program with) and from my experiences teaching > ~80 students how to use R over the last two years. > > Hadley > -- %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% Dr. Gavin Simpson [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522 ECRC, UCL Geography, [f] +44 (0)20 7679 0565 Pearson Building, [e] gavin.simpsonATNOSPAMucl.ac.uk Gower Street, London [w] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfagls/ UK. WC1E 6BT. [w] http://www.freshwaters.org.uk %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
