The flexibility of R and the diversity of the R community leads to a large number of programming styles applied in R packages. We have analyzed 108 million lines of R code from CRAN and quantified the evolution in popularity of 12 style-elements from 1998 to 2019. We attribute 3 main factors that drive changes in programming style: the effect of style-guides, the effect of introducing new features, and the effect of editors. We observe in the data that a consensus in programming style is forming, such as using lower snake case for function names (e.g. softplus_func) and <- rather than = for assignment.
Supplementary materials are available in addition to this article. It can be downloaded at RJ-2022-006.zip
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For attribution, please cite this work as
Yen, et al., "The R Journal: A Computational Analysis of the Dynamics of R Style Based on 108 Million Lines of Code from All CRAN Packages in the Past 21 Years", The R Journal, 2022
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2022-006,
author = {Yen, Chia-Yi and Chang, Mia Huai-Wen and Chan, Chung-hong},
title = {The R Journal: A Computational Analysis of the Dynamics of R Style Based on 108 Million Lines of Code from All CRAN Packages in the Past 21 Years},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2022},
note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2022-006},
doi = {10.32614/RJ-2022-006},
volume = {14},
issue = {1},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {6-21}
}