The Tidyverse

Last updated: September 29, 2019

What is the tidyverse?

Per Joseph Rickert:

The tidyverse is a coherent system of packages for data manipulation, exploration and visualization that share a common design philosophy.

Hadley Wickham, the author of tidyverse, in The tidy tools manifesto:

There are four basic principles to a tidy API:

1. Reuse existing data structures.
2. Compose simple functions with the pipe.
3. Embrace functional programming.
4. Design for humans.

Why use the tidyverse?

One of the biggest frustrations with learning R is that there are almost always multiple ways to accomplish every goal, and often no clear way to determine which is the best.

In my experience, the tidyverse packages offer clearer direction on the optimal way to do things. Often adding tidyverse to the end of a Google query for a R-related question will give better answer than without.

Although there are critics of tidyverse (discussion), for the type of work that I do in R, my tidyverse code runs plenty fast and looks cleaner than non-tidyverse code.

ℹ️ This page is part of my R knowledge base, which attempts to use idiomatic practices with the tidyverse collection of packages as much as possible. If you have suggestions for ways to improve this code, please contact me.