Thursday, April 4, 2013

R 3.0 released; ggplot2 stat_summary bug fixed!

The new version of R was released yesterday. As I understand it, the numbering change to 3.0 represents the recognition that R had evolved enough to justify a new number rather than the addition of many new features. There are some important new features, but I am not sure they will affect me very much. 

For me, the much bigger change occurred in the update of the ggplot2 package to version 0.9.3.1, which actually happened about a month ago, but I somehow missed it. This update is a big deal for me because it fixes a very unfortunate bug from version 0.9.3 that broke one of my favorite features: stat_summary(). As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the great features of ggplot is that allows you to compute summary statistics "on the fly". The bug had broken this feature for certain kinds of summary statistics computed using stat_summary(). A workaround was developed relatively quickly, which I think is a nice example of open-source software development working well, but it's great to have it fixed in the packaged version.

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