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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2017/08/more-on-the-part-time-r-user/"> R – Win-Vector Blog</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<p>I have some more thoughts on the topic: “the part-time <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-project.org/" target="_blank"><code>R</code></a>-user.”<span></span></p>
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<p>I am thinking a bit more about the diversity <code>R</code> users. It occurs to me simply dividing <code>R</code> users into two groups, beginning and advanced, neglects a very important group: the part-time <code>R</code> user. This leaves us teachers and package developers with an unfortunate bias.</p>
<p>The concept of “beginning <code>R</code> user” implies a user who has near infinite time to adapt to our advanced <code>R</code> user work style and other nonsense. “Beginning” is a transient state, one feels we can temporarily accommodate the beginners on our path to assuming them away.</p>
<p>However for a language such as <code>R</code> which deliberately targets non-programmer populations (such as statisticians, scientists, medical professionals, and more) we must assume there is a permanent population of users that have other things going on in their lives. These are users that come to <code>R</code> to make statistical inferences, do science, study social policy or some other non-programming task.</p>
<p>This means us <code>R</code> package developers should work harder than those working in other languages to ensure:</p>
<ul>
<li>Our packages should be simple and intuitive (how low “cognitive load”).</li>
<li>Our packages should obey common design principles such as the principle of least surprise.</li>
<li>Our packages should have sensible and meaningful documentation and examples.</li>
<li>Our functions should have sensible and safe defaults (you don’t have to set obscure options to get sensible behavior).</li>
</ul>
<p>There are a lot more consequences that one can derive from the “part-time user” principle. However, I think the principle itself is probably the most important point.</p>
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