House Keeping Google / YouTube Update Join the Discord! Feedback Rust in the Linux Kernel. R Stuff What is R Again? Great presentation by John Chambers at UseR! 2006 https://www.r-project.org/conferences/useR-2006/Slides/Chambers.pdf The times have changed, now R is very much suited for production use and not just an academic research language Highly recommend reading Advanced R for more comprehensive details on the quirks of the language https://adv-r.hadley.nz/index.html R VS Python for Data? Different philosophies on the use of the language CRAN vs PyPi Interoperability becoming more mainstream now Visualization: R has always been leaps and bounds ahead (Grammar of Graphics, interactive widgets, etc) R Dev Stack? IDEs: RStudio, now Positron https://positron.posit.co/ Managing package installations with renv https://rstudio.github.io/renv/ Building web apps with Shiny: https://shiny.posit.co/ (I got so engrossed in this space that I created the Shiny Developer Series because of it) Early adopter of using Docker with R in devcontainers with VS-Code. New tech I’m excited about to enhance dev stacks and sharing apps WebAssembly with webR https://docs.r-wasm.org/webr/latest/ Shiny apps in webR? Yes you can https://github.com/RConsortium/submissions-pilot4-webR Managing dev environment combined with Nix: The rix package https://github.com/ropensci/rix (More organized links for show notes) R Language: https://r-project.org Posit (formerly RStudio): https://posit.co RStudio IDE https://posit.co/products/open-source/rstudio/ Positron (still in beta): https://positron.posit.co/ History of S and R presentation by John Chambers at useR! 2006: http://www.r-project.org/user-2006/Slides/Chambers.pdf Advanced R (2nd edition) by Hadley Wickham https://adv-r.hadley.nz/index.html Shiny - Easy interactive web applications with R: https://shiny.posit.co/ renv - Project environments for R: https://rstudio.github.io/renv/ R Markdown: https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/ WebR - R in the browser: https://docs.r-wasm.org/webr/latest/ Rix - Reproducible Data Science environments for R with Nix: https://github.com/ropensci/rix Chromatic by ModRetro Chromatic: https://modretro.com/products/chromatic-tetris-bundle?variant=47637522579758 FPGA Mike’s Review Eric’s Thoughts Eric's Socials R Weekly Highlights: https://serve.podhome.fm/r-weekly-highlights Shiny Developer Series: https://shinydevseries.com/ R Podcast: https://r-podcast.org Bluesky: @rpodcast@bsky.social Mastodon: @rpodcast@podcastindex.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-nantz-6621617/ Coder's Socials Mike on X (https://x.com/dominucco) Mike on BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/dominucco.bsky.social) Coder on X (https://x.com/coderradioshow) Coder on BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/coderradio.bsky.social) Show Discord (https://discord.gg/k8e7gKUpEp) Alice (https://alice.dev)
Chapter 1: What housekeeping updates are shared for the podcast?
Misa here again! Hello, hello. Welcome to Coder Radio. Today is the 21st of February in the year of Uncle Elon 2025. I'm your host, Mike Dominick. I'm joined today by Eric Nance, who will come on shortly. Just have a quick housekeeping couple things to go through. All right. You YouTube podcast users. So... Google is still processing the feed. Apparently, it had to all be reprocessed.
That should be up, hopefully, by the time this airs. Like I said, today's the 21st. This is due to air on Monday. So, you know, inshallah, right? Hopefully it works. I do apologize for the inconvenience. It is always available, however, Coder.show.
And if you are normally a YouTube podcast user and still don't have feedback, you can just go to Coder.show, copy the RSS feed and do it that way into YouTube podcast. That does work. But again, hopefully by the time you've heard this, it is just there and searchable and good. So sorry about that little hiccup. Other piece of housekeeping, the Discord is popping.
People are just having a grand old time helping each other with coding questions, IT questions, a lot of gaming chatter, stuff like that. I recommend you join the Discord. That seems to be the newest popular community channel for the show. Bye. Bye.
Chapter 2: Why is Rust being discussed in the context of the Linux kernel?
gigantic margin i mean i thought reddit would take off but it didn't it's it's the discord it's totally free it's no commitments you know you just come say hi be nice keep it clean you're good to go that link is in the show note last piece of housekeeping a little bit of feedback i love you message to me about this rust in the linux kernel drama I don't have a dog in this fight, truthfully.
I would say that there's probably good reasons to write certain types of software in Rust. With that said, I don't know if I had to bet, and I guess we can do it on the end of the year show if I was right or wrong about this. I do think we're going to see more drivers written in Rust.
I would suggest because this is kind of a lot of the feedback was about the drama surrounding this, that, you know, if you are a rust advocate, as I call you, you know, crap people. Maybe honey instead of vinegar might be a little more effective dealing with the folks who maintain the kernel. Obviously, Linus is the obvious one, but it's a team effort and there's a lot of people involved.
So sometimes just railing at them and telling them that your way is better, even if you're right, which I don't know. I'm not a kernel developer. I'm not qualified to say yes or no on that, is just not going to get the reaction you want. So I don't know. That's my dad lecture for the day. Use honey, not vinegar. So, Eric, are you enjoying some tea with honey or vinegar in it?
I'm more of a honey person, but boy, oh boy, I'm glad to be here. We both were in pretty dire straits earlier when we wanted to record this, so I am super thrilled to be on here.
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Chapter 3: Who is Eric Nantz and what is his podcast journey?
And by the way, for those listeners, this is actually not the first time that Michael and I have had a conversation on various podcasts in the past, especially our love for a spiky-haired blue mascot and the company around them. But as a lifelong listener of Coda Radio from episode one, this is a super thrill to be here.
So yeah, it's great to have you again. And yeah, we should do a spiky hair special one day. That would be interesting, especially given some of the changes they seem to be making in their development process.
Every time I think we covered it, there's something new to talk about there.
Sega is always ready to slip on whatever banana peel you are willing to throw in front of it.
Yeah. Great for content, nonetheless.
Great for content. So you also host a very successful podcast. And is it a Pirate Thing one? It's our podcast? Yeah.
Yeah, it's actually been a few different things. I started in podcasting with literally DR Podcast, so no one can take that away from me. It was the first one ever way back in 2012, 2011. I remember I started that one year before my first kid was born. And then, as you well know, life changes quite a bit after.
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Chapter 4: What is R and its evolution in the programming world?
It sure does.
You get a kid and whatnot. But yeah, that was my first foray. And honestly, I started it as a way to It was almost like learning out loud, as they say. I was still pretty new to R at the time, but I figured, well, Linux podcasts have helped me immensely in my journey in grad school. Why not be the first to do this? So that was my first foray in sharing my love for R out there.
And then since then, I've done a couple of different things. And my most current one is called R Weekly Highlights, where we talk about the latest happenings in the community and kind of a news and discussion format. And it's been awesome.
Awesome. So for all your R needs, Eric is your man. So with that said, I think we should ask the obvious question because I have a feeling most of our listeners are not going to know what R is.
So what is R? Yep, we could be here all day for that, but I'll keep it pretty brief here. It actually has its origins much like Unix itself from Bell Labs in another language called S that was jointly developed by John Chambers and some other great developers way back in the 1970s. as a way to have a pretty domain-specific expressive language for statistical analysis and data processing.
And fast forward quite a few years, there were changes in how S was licensed. It became part of a vendor after that.
And then in the mid-1990s, two gentlemen at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Ross Ahaka and Robert Gentleman, were inspired by S and decided to make an open source language that was basically taking the best of the S language and making it completely open source and community developed. And that became R. And so it's got a long history. But honestly, fastening forward to today,
R is standing on the shoulders of open source and the fact that, yes, R itself has everything you need to do a nice data analysis, visualization, import data. It's a community of over 25,000 packages at the time we're talking here. They can turn R into almost absolutely anything of what the language you want to do. I have lots of ideas on where this is going in the future.
And it's greatly helped me in my daily work. And it's super inspiring to see just how far the community has taken the R language itself and to be able to do some really cool stuff with it across the board.
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Chapter 5: How does the R package management system work?
I did use Emacs back in the day. I knew it. Rejected, gone. Rejected, gone, yeah. Since I've seen the way with Vim, but that's another story.
Wait, wait, wait. You don't get to decide. Okay, finish what you're saying, but we've got to jump back to that.
Oh, we will. Yeah, so there was actually a package that was archived a couple weeks ago by a good friend of mine in the developer community, not because his package had a problem, but because a dependency package that his package used. had a problem with a bin bash prompt of all things. You'll have to listen to the latest R Weekly episode for our details on that.
Nonetheless, my point here is that there are some advancements to make our packaging a bit more modern to take the best of PiPi and parts of CRAN and try to make a more... I'll say clear system for contribution. Some of those are called our universe and a new one that's coming in the works called multiverse that I'm keeping an eye on. So CRAN has had its warts over the years.
It still would not be where it is today without it. But we're seeing some modern approaches that I think are going to take the language to another level in the near future here.
So a quick question. Let's say we have Eric's amazing package in CRAN. And my application depends on it for who cares, whatever it does, right? And then it gets archived. Me as the, I guess I'm not the end user, but as the end user of that library, right? The developer developing the main application. What happens to my app?
So the good news is your app as it is, if you don't need to change it, can still be used as is. What happens is if you needed to update anything and you try to install that.
Right, let's say it's an ongoing thing.
Yeah, an ongoing thing. If you try to install it again, R itself will get mad at you and say, oh, that's not available anymore. And there's a custom way to get an archive of a package. It's more convoluted, but it is technically possible. But it is an issue that could affect people, especially, like you said, in an ongoing project.
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Chapter 6: What are the capabilities of R in web development?
And we had one in the Python world where it was just somebody put in a fake package that had a suspiciously similar name to a very popular package. And it was malware, right? And people not paying attention just installed it.
Yep. And truth be told, many of the users of R are just going to install a package the moment they see it mentioned on a blog or whatever setting. So it is advantageous that it is on a reputable repository, but R does let you install packages from GitHub directly if you're inclined. And yeah, that's where you have to have a little more of a careful eye, so to speak.
Makes sense, makes sense. So, okay, I know the reputation, and I like that you put this in the notes, it is R is kind of a research language, but that's not true anymore, is it?
Yeah, I mean, certainly, like I said, it had its roots in academia, like I said, at University of Auckland and others in that space. But I would say in the last 10 years, certainly in the last five years, there's been explosive growth in how art can stand, you know, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder with some of the other languages, as someone might typically say, is a production ready language.
We are going to mention the infamous Python. I'm sure as we go along here, the knock has always been, well, R is great to prototype that algorithm, but you got to put it in Python for production, right? I think those days are over. I think we have enough tooling, enough resources, and enough experience with putting R in highly important positions.
production workflows, whether it's for machine learning, whether it's for web applications, which I'd love to talk about. And now, even in the future, there are even R packages that are interfacing with the rest of all things. So there is lots of opportunities to use R in production now, and it's really exciting.
Let me tell you something. The crap people are everywhere. They're like the Borg. They want to get their claws into everything. I am not surprised that they've gone for the beautiful R community.
It was only a matter of time, right? It was only a matter of time.
Bye.
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Chapter 7: How does R handle dependencies and environment management?
which kind of has it's it's in between a traditional object oriented programming and a more of a expressive language. And it does some things that may make a purist programmer think, why the heck is it doing that with nonstandard evaluation and the like? But then it's got other systems that are more rigorous and also extension packages that are trying to bring it a little more rigor, such as R6.
And there's a new one out there called S7 that's trying to consolidate it all together. So it's got a long history. And depending on your needs, you might do one system versus the other. The S3 system is great for just the interactive data analysis, get my data frame in, do a quick plot on it, do a quick table on it, and you can write it in very few lines of code.
Whereas the more rigid structure is great for, as I said, these web application development, these more comprehensive packages that are doing a lot of internal processing. That's where things like R6 and this new S7 system are coming to play here.
Okay, so I know this could be my total ignorance here, but I'm kind of getting F sharp vibes, right? The use cases sound pretty similar. And the you can be a functional Pharaoh if you choose, or you can lean in on some features. Is that that fair or way off base?
No, you get to choose your own adventure here. So I would say, yeah, the flexibility of how R is built in terms of what I call its base install are absolutely tailor-made for those interactive data analysis. You might be familiar with Jupyter Notebooks or IPython type workflows.
When you combine R with a package called R Markdown, you get that very similar experience of creating these dynamically created reports with interactive code chunks, but it's very expressive in that language, absolutely.
Okay, makes sense. So let's say I'm putting down my Serpentine and my greedy Ruby Mineways, and obviously I'm still going to be mourning for Objective-C forever. I'm wearing black the rest of my life, like a goth kid. But let's say I want to see the light of R. I know that there is RStudio. I know that VS Code has a pretty good extension. What else do I need to get rocking?
Yeah, so RStudio kind of came about 12, 13 years ago where there had been attempts at IDEs in R before, and some worked decently well on specific operating systems. Heck, of all things, I remember there was a plug-in to Notepad++, of all things, to interact with R for the Windows users.
Surprisingly full-featured application.
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Chapter 8: What tools and IDEs support R development?
The problem of you need different versions of R for different applications that are either stuck because of dependency reasons or maybe it's something Greenfield and you want to get the hottest new stuff. Is there such a thing as like an RN for something like that?
You literally said it. It is. There is a package called RM to help fill that gap for a given project. This is a good example here is there may be a project that I have where it's literally more of a traditional data analysis, get a report out, send it to a stakeholder, but do it through our scripts or in our markdown report or more recently a Quarto engine, which we can talk about sometime.
But then I have different needs for these shiny apps where it is a software stack, right? I have dependencies that are going to be tailor made to that shiny app that that other project does not care about. So our end is kind of like ours answer to, you know, pip or virtual environments. I'll be it. I think they do it a bit cleaner.
But again, I'm biased, but it has been a huge help to making sure that for a given project, especially for my day job stuff. I can be assured that I can have that dependency library self-contained in that project. And no matter what happens on the host Linux infrastructure with what I'll call the central library of our packages, that particular RM project is isolated.
I can do whatever I want with that. I can opt into package upgrades. I can opt into package downgrades. But I get that flexibility. And without RM, I do think R would be in much worse straits for production use. So it has become a huge part of my toolbox to make sure that I'm doing effective dependency management. Is it perfect? Like I said, nothing's perfect, Mike.
But it sure is a heck of a lot better than trying to manage these R libraries yourself and hope for the best that you got that symlink correct when you're loading that into your R session.
Ah, yes. Toolchain management as your system updates or just gets a little more cluttered. Always a good time.
Yeah, yeah. I've had nightmares upon nightmares when somebody asked me to help debug what's going on, where they load a package and they say, wait, it can't be loaded. And wait, I thought I installed it. No, it's because you had this weird cryptic version in your home library that's masking the LDD libraries that the hero package should be loading.
Many hours have been spent trying to fix those issues.
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