As an impatient person, I typically use progress bars for any code that takes more than a few minutes to run. In a previous post, I wrote about creating ASCII progress bars in R and Racket. The Racket version depended on the raart module, which "provides …
In my second post on this blog, I wrote about my interest in learning new programming languages and my thoughts on how to choose the next language to learn. It's been over a year since that post and I thought it would be worthwhile to reflect on what I've…
Over the last 6 months, I have been learning Racket in my free time. One of my first posts on this blog laid out my reasons for choosing Racket. The relatively low barrier to entry (e.g., easy installation of Racket and packages, DrRacket IDE, good docs, …
In a previous post, I used GUI toolkits to make progress bars in R and Racket. However, I usually prefer the ASCII progress bars of the progress package in R. The progress package includes several options for formatting the progress bar. I particularly li…
As an impatient person and an insecure programmer, I typically use progress bars for any code that takes more than a few minutes to run. In R, a progress bar widget is available through the tcltk package. library(tcltk) pb <- tkProgressBar(title = &qu…
In learning about reading CSV files in Racket, I have started to reconsider whether storing small(ish) datasets in CSV files is the best default behavior [1]. My default was set by primarily working in R, where reading and writing CSV files plays a centra…
In a previous post, I wrote about reading and writing data to file while retaining the structure and attributes of the data (i.e., data serialization). However, I more commonly pass data around as text files (usually, CSV files). For this post, I created …
In a previous post, I wrote a function to perform repeated timings of untyped and typed versions of the same Racket functions. #lang racket (require math) (define (time-apply-cpu-old proc lst reps) (define out (for/list ([i (in-range reps)]) …
Racket's if is not vectorized like ifelse in R. Instead, this Racket code (if (test-expr) true-expr false-expr) is the same as this R code. if (test_expr){ true_expr } else { false_expr } In contrast, R's ifelse function is vectorized meanin…
On my journey to learn Racket, I look for small pieces of R code to try to implement in Racket. A blog post about speeding up population simulations in R with the Rcpp package seemed like a good candidate for implementing in Racket. I was particularly int…
R makes it easy to generate random numbers from a wide variety of distributions with a consistent interface. For example, runif, rnorm, and rpois generate random numbers from uniform, normal, and Poisson distributions, respectively. > x = runif(n = 100…
When programming in R, I generally pass data around by reading and writing text files (typically, CSV files). The ubiquity of CSV files means that many different types of software will open them easily (e.g., Notepad, Excel, TextEdit, etc.). However, if t…
When building a simulation model in R, I might want to group related input parameters into a data structure. For example, in a life cycle model with resident and anadromous fish, you might use different fecundity parameters for each life history type. One…
I have recently started learning Racket. For a first task, I tried to build a simple age-structured population model. I hit a stumbling block and reached out to the helpful folks on the Racket mailing list. In this post, I recap the mailing list exchange …
For many years, I've had intentions of learning another programming language. I would guess that I've done 70-80% of my programming work in R and 20-30% in NetLogo. Those two languages have served me well and I haven't yet been in a position where I was r…