Let's look at what we've learnt so far about code development.

Discuss with students how some of the things they have learnt will help improve their code.

Making code more readable

Readability is the most important part of writing nice code.

Ideally your scripts should be short and readable, anyone should be able to pick them up and understand what it does.

Tell us what your function is doing, not how

The most important thing that writing functions helps is for you to concentrate on writing code that describes what will happen, not how it will happen. The how becomes an implementation issue that you don't have to worry about.

Keep your analysis script small by moving R functions into another file

Our recommendation for writing nice R code is that in most cases, you should put your functions into a file with an intuitive name, like analysis-fun.R and read these into memory by calling:

source("analysis-fun.R")

From the point of view of writing nice code, this approach is nice because it leaves you with an uncluttered analysis script, and a repository of useful functions that can be loaded into any analysis script in your project. It also lets you group related functions together easily.

Break down problem into bite size pieces

Corresponding with a single operation, single function.

Know that your code is doing the right thing

By testing your functions!

Keep workspace clean - helps avoid bugs from multiple data objects

By using functions, you limit the scope of variables. As much as possible functions should be self contained and not depend on things like global variables (these are variables you've defined in the main workspace that would show up in RStudio's object list). This means when you read code you don't have to look elsewhere to reason about what values variables might take.

Don't repeat yourself

Functions enable easy reuse within a project. If you see blocks of similar lines of code through your project, those are usually candidates for being moved into functions.

If your calculations are performed through a series of functions, then the project becomes more modular and easier to change. This is especially the case for which a particular input always gives a particular output.

Remember to be stylish

Applying consistent style to your code, such as that recommended in the google's R style guide, makes your code more readable.