Dr. Hadley Wickham is the Chief Scientist of RStudio and Assistant Professor of Statistics at Rice University. He is the developer of the famous R package ggplot2 for data visualization and the author of many other widely used packages like plyr and reshape2. On Sep 13, 2013 he gave a talk at Department of Statistics, Purdue University, and later I (Yixuan) had a conversation with him (Hadley), talking about his own experience and interest on data visualization, data tidying, R programming and other related topics.
It’s well known that R is a memory based software, meaning that datasets must be copied into memory before being manipulated. For small or medium scale datasets, this doesn’t cause any troubles. However, when you need to deal with larger ones, for instance, financial time series or log data from the Internet, the consumption of memory is always a nuisance.
Just to give a simple illustration, you can put in the following code into R to allocate a matrix named x and a vector named y.