Programming

• Building an R Package with LLMs: Insights and Observations

  September 15, 2023

  I just watched a YouTube video by Jared P. Lander, focusing on building an R package with the help of a Language Model (LLM). The video speaks to several intriguing aspects of using LLMs for programming tasks, particularly in R. Basic Function Creation The initial task involved creating a function that counts different file types in a specified folder. When the model was instructed with the prompt, “write a function whose input is a path to a folder and the output is a count of each of the different file types in the folder,” it produced a function using base R.

• Transitioning to Quarto: A Data Scientist's Toolkit

  September 15, 2023

  In a recent YouTube presentation, Daniel Chen discussed his experience transitioning from RMarkdown and Jupyter Notebooks to Quarto. This post distills the core concepts and quantitative elements discussed in the talk. Literate programming allows data scientists to interweave code and prose text within a single document, facilitating better reporting and documentation. Quarto serves as the successor to RMarkdown, bringing multiple enhancements and broader functionality. The Basics of RMarkdown vs. Quarto RMarkdown has been a foundational tool for data scientists, but Quarto builds on its strengths with the following upgrades: