The next EdinbR meeting will be:

Wednesday November 18th, 5-6pm in S1, 7 George Square.

This month’s meeting is themed around good coding practise. We have two speakers lined up:

• Caterina Constantinescu: Good coding practices in R

Coding standards for a given language are meant to improve clarity and collaboration, and can be essential for maintaining and enhancing older scripts. This talk will briefly highlight a set of guidelines for good coding practices in R. I will present a set of standards devised specifically for R, as well as some guidelines which can be extrapolated from Python and Java, referring for instance to file organisation, commenting, the appropriate use of white space, naming conventions etc.

• Guillaume Devailly: Traps and flaws of the R language: Examples from The R Inferno eBook by Patrick Burns

R is great, but has some flaws and pitfalls we all encountered while learning it. The R Inferno is a funny to read, free eBook by Patrick Burns which contains a rather exhaustive collection of those flaws and some advice to avoid them. We will discuss a selection of beginner level examples, and learn some good R coding practice in an (awkwardly nerdy) funny session. Did you now that typing 0.3/3 == 0.1 leads to unexpected results? Or that many important words are not reserved by R, so that you can totally mess up your environment with F <- TRUE ?

Pub Social

We’re having a pub social afterwards in the Potting Shed (just around the corner). If you can’t make the talks you are more than welcome to join us in the pub from 6pm onwards.

For any newcomers (you’re very welcome!), here’s a map of where we’ll be.

Meetings are open for all to attend (e.g. no University of Edinburgh card required). Hope to see you there!