Hadley Wickham – “You can't do data science in a GUI”

Hadley Wickham is Chief Scientist at RStudio, a member of the R Foundation, and Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and the University of Auckland. He builds tools (both computational and cognitive) to make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science (the tidyverse: including ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr, purrr, and readr) and principled software development (roxygen2, testthat, devtools).

In his ACM Chicago local chapter talk, Wickham discusses four essential tenets of his work:

1) Data science requires programming; a GUI does not provide the power necessary to tackle the creative challenges that data science requires.

2) There are huge advantages to code, particularly when you see it as a medium of communication.

3) R is a terrific environment for writing data analysis code. It has some quirky features as a programming language, but many of the quirks are well tailored to the problems of data science.

4) Code should be primary artefact of any analysis, but you might generate the code in ways apart from typing it on a keyboard.