Colin Gillespie takes us down memory lane with some old, old code:
Last week I spent some time reminiscing about my PhD and looking through some old R code. This trip down memory lane led to some of my old R scripts that amazingly still run. My R scripts were fairly simple and just created a few graphs. However now that I’ve been programming in R for a while, with hindsight (and also things have changed), my original R code could be improved.
I wrote this code around April 2000. To put this into perspective,
- R mailing list was started in 1997
- R version 1.0 was released in Feb 29, 2000
- The initial release of Git was in 2005
- Twitter started in 2006
- StackOverflow was launched in 2008
Basically, sharing code and getting help was much more tricky than today – so cut me some slack!
It’s a good sign when an arbitrary task becomes easier to understand as a language evolves. And I’m glad they dumped the underscore assignment operator.