Finding and reading source code a.k.a. learning from other developers

[stefaniebutland]

Who is the audience?

Who might want to know this? What other groups or organizations might be interested?

• R users and developers
• the concepts are relevant beyond the R community

Why is this important?

Quoted from Jenny Bryan:

At some point in package development, your problems get more and more specific. There may not be a targeted piece of documentation, blog post or book chapter about your exact problem. Now what?

There are various methods of finding other people's relevant and working source code. Learning how to find and learn from such examples is a very handy meta-skill.

What should be covered?

• GitHub searches, esp. limiting to user:cran, path:R, etc.
• The lookup package
• Debugging techniques that reveal which function's source you need to be reading
• RStudio IDE gestures for revealing source

Suggested speakers or contributors

Resources you would recommend to the audience

• Read the R source!, from R-hub

[maelle]

"Improving GitHub code search" on GitHub blog (still in preview i.e. not available for everyone)

[Bisaloo]

On this topic, I like to use the 'Source: XXX.R' link in the pkgdown documentation.

Maybe only tangentially related but showing how to use git blame (e.g., in the GitHub web interface) is very useful to learn when and why something has been changed.

[maelle]

I really like @Bisaloo's idea to explain how to explore repo history!