Usedthese
Who ordered that? You may be wondering.
Motivation
Usedthese was born of a selfish desire to better understand my personal package & function usage. I find it makes it easier for me to check for consistency of usage, acknowledge the packages I most need to keep abreast of (or go deeper on), and spot opportunities for updates to the latest and greatest.
It started as a chunk of code that varied from project to project. Evolved into a common piece of code included in all projects. And finally, with the help and guidance of the R Packages (2e) book, has entered the hallowed halls of CRAN.
Example Use Case
Each “little project” on this Quarto site focuses on a data science technique or machine learning model to analyse real-world data. At the foot of each of these is a quantified view of the R packages and functions used in the associated code. This is achieved by including used_here() in each Quarto document.
used_there() scrapes all the tables created by used_here() to enable a Favourite Things article on how R packages and functions are used across the website.
When the Tidyverse blog announced changes to dplyr and purrr a quick review of my Favourite Things identified a number of opportunities to try out the exciting new features. For example, dplyr introduced temporary grouping with the .by argument for mutate() and amigos. group_by() and ungroup() had been used many times and most of these occurrences could be replaced with the new more concise approach.
Conflicted?
Usethese is designed to work in conjunction with the conflicted package. Whilst library() supports exclusion and include.only arguments, it can feel a little awkward when dealing with pre-loaded base packages or meta-packages such as the tidyverse, tidymodels and fpp3. Conflicted tells you when you try to use a function whose name is shared by two or more loaded packages. And it offers fine-grained conflict resolution based on your preferences.
Multi-site Usage Analysis
I’m considering adding a function that would enable analysis of usage across multiple opted-in sites. If you do deploy usedthese within your Quarto website and would be willing to have the site included, then please raise an issue with your listing page as the title and select the “usedthese” label. The listing URL should link to one or more posts which include used_here() in the code.