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- Hacker News
- We have too many videos (since creating one is so easy), too many music (since recording it is so easy), too many books (since publishing an e-book is so easy). Now the same story happens again, for software. But this time it causes more troubles...by piokoch
- I think a language having a central repository of libraries that anyone can publish stuff in is a stupid idea in the first place. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when it goes to shit.by vrighter
- Better search could solve this I think. If packages could be automatically, semantically grouped and made searchable, then there would be a lot less packages. a lot of times is simply faster to remake that to search for something appropriate. I don't think RAG is the right answer, it needs to be more capable than that. i don't know quite what that would look like.
I would love to be able to filter out low effort, bad docs, no tests, no recent contributions and and more after typing a semantic query for a library to use.
by frogperson - It's the same on any package index now.by f311a
- Frankly the bigger problem is an over reliance among R instructors on the tidyverse, an ever-expanding ecosystem of redundant functions and anti-patterns. They’re teaching new R users that everything can be solved with yet another package import and skipping over teaching them how to use the already powerful and intuitive base packages.by Mairoce
- The surprising thing to me is that it's taken as long as it has for CRAN to have this problem. As others have said, this is happening everywhere.by alastairr
- People would typically choose based on CRAN TaskViews or follow conventional methodologies, but what I notice from this is that R is truly a language used only by those who use it. And the people who use it are usually master's students or professors; it's rarely used at the undergraduate level. So even those with that level of academic background and training must have had their own implementation roadblocks. Could that be why the use of R has exploded with the help of AI? Looking at this, I think it's fair to understand that even domain experts found programming difficult. Seeing this, can we really say that AI is always bad? For some people, it has become both the hands and a voice for their words.by jdw64
- I feel like CRAN should be used for packages that are expressly made for others to use, and with effort put in to the documentation and vignettes.
If you’re making a package for a small team or aren’t pushing it to a large audience then just keep it on a GitHub repository. It is almost as easy to install from GitHub with devtools as it is to install.packages().
by parsimo2010