Development philosophy

Dependencies

• try to minimize the use of dependencies as much as possible. If a package is only used to do 1 or 2 things, those can usually be done in base R. Having fewer dependencies makes the package easier to install and maintain.

Visualization

• all plots are built with ggplot2, for aesthetic consistency
• all plots should support black-and-white modes
• plot methods should not include anything that is easily modifiable by the user (i.e., they shouldn't include a title argument, in favor of someone using ggtitle() on the returned object.
• if a plotting function modifies the input, it can be useful to return the modified data

Documentation

• Use Roxygen to document every function.
  • However, we don't need to show everything in the package index. Type the following as a Roxygen comment to generate the documentation file without including the function in the package index.

#' @keywords internal

• following the DRY principle, we can port comments across functions by using #' @importParams <other function>. This is used extensively with plotting functions, which all call add_common_aes()