useR! 2020: Keynote - Speaking R (Amelia McNamara)

This video is part of the virtual useR! 2020 conference.

[MarcusSpehBirkenkrahe]

Very interesting! A lot here resonates with me - especially the reading code out loud. Many of these issues are going to be exacerbated by the 100% online delivery mode that we're forced to embrace now. I am less confident that the parallel between human and programming language holds or how useful it is. See Knuth on that e.g. (and the origins of literate programming which is not code = language but "you need language or else code is not understandable", losely speaking). Since we don't understand human language at all, it seems risky to use it overly in comparisons. Put differently: we operate on the basis of a model that we don't understand. Even less sure about the "pair programming" approach. That you compare several encodings/R styles is commendable and really interesting, too - you really are trying to get to the bottom of this! I never thought of teachability in terms of language unti I read Matloff's "TidyverseSceptic" essay (2019). Wonder what you think of it? Why are you so clear that "base-R is not the way to go?" I personally lean towards data.table partly because of how close it is to SQL and our database query tradition, which is much, much older than R. In my field (business informatics), SQL dominates. Looking forward to reading your papers.