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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/08/the-r-community-is-awesome-and-fast/"> R – Win-Vector Blog</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<p>Recently I whined/whinged or generally complained about a few sharp edges in some powerful <a target="_blank" href="https://cran.r-project.org/">R</a> systems. </p>
<p>In each case I was treated very politely, listened to, and actually got fixes back in a very short timeframe from volunteers. That is really great and probably one of the many reasons R is a great ecosystem.</p>
<p>Please read on for my list of <code>n=3</code> interactions.<span></span></p>
<ol>
<li>While discussing plotting market data I <a target="_blank" href="http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/06/using-geom_step/">ran into a corner-case</a> with <a target="_blank" href="http://ggplot2.org/">ggplot2</a>. Even though I figured out how to work around it, it is now <a target="_blank" href="https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/issues/1645">fixed by the ggplot2 team</a>! </li>
<li>I wrote an entire article <a target="_blank" href="http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/05/on-ranger-respect-unordered-factors/">denouncing a default setting of a single argument</a> in the <a target="_blank" href="https://cran.r-project.org/package=ranger">ranger random forest library</a>. The <a target="_blank" href="http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/05/on-ranger-respect-unordered-factors/#comment-66275">ranger author himself replied with a fix </a>that is very clever and mathematically well-founded (I suspect he had be researching this issue a while on his own).</li>
<li>I <a target="_blank" href="http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/08/my-criticism-of-r-numeric-summary/">complained about summary presentation fidelity in base R <code>summary.default</code></a>. You guessed it: <a target="_blank" href="https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2016-August/073027.html">the volunteers have generously fielded a patch</a>!</li>
</ol>
<p>Like any real-world system R represents a sequence of history and compromises. Only unused systems can be perfect without compromise. It is very evident how eager and able the volunteers who maintain it are to make sure R represents very good compromises.</p>
<p>I would like to offer a sincere appreciation and thank you from me to the R community. If this is what you can expect using R it is yet another strong argument for R. </p>
<p>And personal thanks to: Martin Maechler, Hadley Wickham, and Marvin N. Wright.</p>
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<div>To <strong>leave a comment</strong> for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: <strong><a href="http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/08/the-r-community-is-awesome-and-fast/"> R – Win-Vector Blog</a></strong>.</div>
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