found one of my favorite parts of R the language again.

[jonny@neuromatch.social]

found one of my favorite parts of R the language again. This is all that's written about inheritance in the official language reference, like the person died in the middle of writing it. The only thing that has changed between the first capture for v2.15.2 on archive.org in 2012 and v4.5.2 today is that they added the final "e" in the last "the"

[jonny@neuromatch.social]

R's language reference is very strange as far as language references go due to its history. It's written as if the language is in the process of being discovered, rather than designed, because in part it sort of was. so you have sections that are like "we think the language works like this, but we should talk about it, I think it should work like this..."

[jonny@neuromatch.social]

I think one of the thing R demonstrates is how important the distinction between

"we want to make something good by making it structurally impossible to do something we think is bad"

and

"we want to make something good, so we'll tell you doing that is probably not a good idea but it's still possible. Whatever happens when you do that is sort of on you tho."

Allowing people to do (good) things that you didn't anticipate is literally the best possible outcome of making anything, and the balance between unstructured, groping in the dark chaos and the world of grammarlike intuition is the first, only, and total challenge. The evaluation model of R is a product of serendipity and reverse engineering that is objectively horrible to imagine, but has resulted in some of the most downright intuitive tools I have ever had the pleasure of using.