I’ll start by saying Better R in its current form is sufficient for my needs. The cost of creating the interoperability between the two languages was far less than the benefit of being able to write programs in D. I have access to all the functionality built into R, all the R packages ever written, all the R code that’s ever been written, and the libraries that have ever been given an R interface.
With that disclaimer out of the way, there are clear opportunities for improvement. Here’s a list of some that I’ve been thinking about recently.
1. More users. This project has always been about creating something beneficial for me. I do wonder why nobody else uses it. Maybe it’s not something anyone else is looking for, but I doubt that.
2. The documentation should be better.
3. It should run on more than Linux. This is kind of related to the first point. If there were more users, someone would do the work to get it to run on Windows and Mac. It probably wouldn’t take much. It’s not something I’ll ever have the time or resources to do.
4. There should be a Dub package. That seems to be how people work with D. Again, this is a resource problem.
5. There should be a better way to start a new project using Better R. I’m not sure what’s the best way to proceed. There’s non-trivial overhead with the current approach.
6. We need a textbook using Better R so folks can figure out what it does and how they can use it.
7. It would be nice to have user-friendly wrappers around more libraries.
8. The website is not going to win any design awards. This one’s a combination of my lack of time and my dislike of most modern web design. I have to admit that I think most websites out there are ugly and their functionality sucks. A plain vanilla website like this is ugly, but it’s just html, so it works the way normal people expect it to. I’m sure the site turns off most of the people that visit, but a different design would likely turn me off.
Lance Bachmeier
2023-11-15