It’s widely considered good programming practice to have lots of little functions rather than a few big functions. The reasons behind this are simple. When your program breaks, it’s much nicer to debug a five line function than a five hundred line function. Additionally, by breaking up your code into little chunks, you often find 
Here at HSL we have a lot of smart kinda-numerate people who have access to a lot of data. On a bad day, kinda-numerate includes myself, but in general I’m talking about scientists who have have done an introductory stats course, but not much else. When all you have is a t-test, suddenly everything looks 
Reflection is a programming concept that sounds scarier than it is. There are three related concepts that fall under the umbrella of reflection, and I’ll be surprised if you haven’t come across most of these code ideas already, even if you didn’t know it was called reflection. The first concept is examination of your variables. 
I have something a fondness for ridiculous variable names, so it’s useful to be able to check whether my latest concoction is legitimate. More so if it is automatically generated. Not having an is_valid_variable_name function is one of those odd omissions from R, and the assign function doesn’t check validity. To recap, there are a 
Earlier this week, I was trying to figure out the path of execution through a big chunk of code. Once you reach a certain size of codebase, tracking which function gets called when can be tricky. My first thought for dealing with this was to add a message line at the start of each function 
A discussion on StackOverflow today shows an interesting use of special characters inside the cat function. The most common special characters that you may have come across are the tab and newline characters, represented by \t and \n respectively. Try them for yourself. cat("Red\tlorry\nYellow\tlorry\n") cat also respects the backspace character, \b, and the carriage return 
When you draw a histogram, an important question is “how many bar should I draw?”. This should inspire an indignant response. You didn’t become a programmer to answer questions, did you? No. The whole point of programming is to let your computer do your thinking for you, giving you more time to watch videos of 
When you first learnt about data frames in R, I’m sure that, like me, you thought “This is a lot of hassle having to type the names of data frames over and over in order to access each column”. library(MASS) anorexia$wtDiff <- anorexia$Postwt - anorexia$Prewt #I have to type anorexia how many times? Indeed, any 
Last week I decided to start a weekly column detailing an interesting function each Friday, entirely forgetting that I would be on holiday, without internet access (shock horror!), tomorrow. So here’s your column a little early. The alarm function is something of a novelty, in that all it does is to make an annoying noise 
I notice that the latest version of R has upped the maximum length of variable names from 256 characters to a whopping 10 000! (See ?name.) It makes the 63 character limit in MATLAB look rather pitiful by comparison. Come on MathWorks! Let’s have the ability to be stupidly verbose in our variable naming! Tagged: 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
