The breaking changes are all quite severe, I hope there is real demand for the features they are bringing in.
Even if they don't agree with the direction Wickham's Tidyverse is going it showcased how flexible the R language was to being rewritten from the inside. Hadley effectively pulled of a more significant language upgrade with less breakages - the R core team could learn something from him here. Even their sensible na.rm default for new functions is introducing more weird inconsistencies to R.
Tidyverse introduces plenty of breakages, and as noted elsewhere does relentlessly between its own versions. Just check how the docs have evolved on ggplot2 for one example.
Tidyverse seems to be very much aimed at solving the initial learning curve. However, ANY system which uses allows non-experts to fake expertise denies them the ability to achieve real expertise, and also takes away skills from existing experts.
I'm grumpy about some of the reasons given for Tidyverse superiority: The Stringr package is supposedly somehow better because all of its functions start with "string" so you know you are working with strings. Huh? Because it replaces/wraps a lot of functions which begin with grep so you know you are working with regular expressions. Should we also create a "numbr" package which renames every function which works with "numbers"? Or maybe a subset of numbers, maybe we need a package called "integr".
data.table blows tbs out of the water, once you learn how to use it. Yes, it is harder to learn. Yes, it is very much worth it.
Yes, Hadley pulled off a language upgrade, and with the power of RStudio behind him has a strong hand indeed.
Agreed! String manipulation functions in base R work differently in ways that make data cleaning annoying. Stringr frees me from having to remember that stuff and lets me focus on what I'm trying to do instead.
Has the R core team publicly stated that they disagree with direction Wickham's Tidyverse is going? Genuinely asking as I love the Tidyverse, but would be interested to hear arguments against it.
I am not sure why the original commenter said that tidyverse is more backwards-compatible compared with R core. It used to introduce breaking changes every 6 months or so.
I like the tidyverse, but Hadley's struggles with lazy evaluation and arguments has cost me lots and lots of time updating internal code at various workplaces.
Don't get me wrong, the tidyverse is great, but if I was writing R code that I expected to run without supervision for a long time, I'd avoid it as much as possible.
Moving up to a major version (1.0) implies there could have been breaking changes if you follow semver. And including something like `unnest_legacy()` is helpful for people making the transition.
Just like `stringsAsFactors=FALSE` happened on a transition from 3.x to 4.x, because it is breaking, dplyr 1.0 had breaking changes.
Even if they don't agree with the direction Wickham's Tidyverse is going it showcased how flexible the R language was to being rewritten from the inside. Hadley effectively pulled of a more significant language upgrade with less breakages - the R core team could learn something from him here. Even their sensible na.rm default for new functions is introducing more weird inconsistencies to R.