Hollywood movies are obsessed with outrunning explosions and outrunning crashing alien spaceships. For explosions the movies give the optimal (but unusable) solution: run straight away. For crashing alien spaceships they give the same advice, but in this case it is wrong. We demonstrate the correct angle to flee.
The design of the statistical programming language R sits in a slightly uncomfortable place between the functional programming and object oriented paradigms. The upside is you get a lot of the expressive power of both programming paradigms. A downside of this is: the not always useful variability of the language’s list and object extraction operators.
Towards the end of our write-up Survive R we recommended using explicit environments with new.env(hash=TRUE,parent=emptyenv()), assign() and get() to simulate mutable string-keyed maps for storing results. This advice rose out of frustration with the apparent inconsistency with the user facing R list operators. In this article we bite the bullet and discuss the R list operators a bit more clearly. Read more…
