and it’s on CRAN
This is a bit of an odd post. This time, I don’t present my crazy interesting opinion about something in the digital social world. Instead, I show some of my work with a bit of pride.
R is my native programming language (yes, I know some say it’s not a programming language). I started using R in 2002 (seriously). Remember the #R icon with the red dot? It probably landed there when one of the developers had a little fight with paint half an hour before release of 0.3.1. Anyhow, I must be among the 1% longest-time R-users in the world, but for some or another reason, I never came to publish a package.
Only now I realize that this dot is not red, but Pink!
Why is this my first package?
R-users as old a me certainly remember clicking on “install package” in the silly Windows interface (I still used a mouse in 2002), and getting a little scroll-list of 37 packages. I think this made me think for myself: who do I think I am to contribute a package? This must be something for very important people.
Well, I spent 23 years *not spamming* the R community with my handcrafted functions. Even if I made figure functions that were almost as nice as the figure here on the right. (for n00bs, this was on the R home page for many years) They all I just felt too trivial to add this list of very important packages. I did contribute to other packages, but never wrote my own.
Now, in 2025, there are almost 23,000 R packages, so I thought: Who am I do *not* add a package too! I am not going into details about the package here. If you care about analyses of #power and #sample #size you will be interested in reading the package webpage.
Fancy name, fancy logo
However, I honestly really think powergrid is a solid package, because:
- It does not depend on any other packages, aside from base R
- It has plenty of great examples
- It makes a job that can be hard easier
- It is highly generic
- It is written with love for R
- The code and examples use =, not <-. Because that’s better.
In 2002, packages did not have pretentious logo’s yet, but here we are. A logo with a little memory pixel of the old days.
Thanks R, we had a lot of fun together in the past 23 years!
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