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Sympathy For The Part-Timer

John Mount wants us to think about part-time users:

The second point I think is particularly interesting. It means:

An R user who does not consider themselves an expert programmer could be maintaining code that they understand, but could not be expected to create from scratch.

Or:

Let’s have some sympathy for the part-time R user.

This is the point we will emphasize in our new example.

Read on for a particular example.  I think this is good advice to generalize:  write your code to make it as easy as possible for “part-time” users.  This applies to custom code you write as well, as unless you are constantly in a particular part of the code base, you’ll forget the details later and have the same problems that a part-timer would have working with a different language.