I don't intend this to be directed at the Mod and User in question, but this instance has me questioning what kinds of edits to posts are acceptable here.
See this recent edit to a post of mine. It is:
- trivial to the point of uselessness, there is zero practical benefit to the reader,
- requires an additional package unrelated to the others to be installed before the code can be used/run.
By "trivial" I don't mean specifically "small"; what I do mean is "inconsequential" or "superficial", where there is no improvement per se following the edit.
In the linked instance, the edit involved changing from using a standard base R data frame to the modern reimplementation of data frames from the tibble package.
Also, the intent comes across as ideological. By "ideological" what I meant specifically was the ongoing debates about base R versus tidy vs data table. I don't think this is specific to R, so that part of the question pertains to how should we treat edits wherein code is edited to change it from one paradigm to another?
I know that I as the author of the post have an overrule, which I exercised, but as this was approved by a Mod I wondered if it was me that was out of step here?
with()
etc), didn't change the practical behaviour, etc, etc. I'd be just as miffed if someone came in and edited the entire post to use tidyverse tools, because what's the point, aim? It wouldn't change anything other than make it more difficult for non-tidyverse-users to understand $\endgroup$tidyverse
, which I explain here. This particular edit only made your post harder to read - before, any user of base R could understand it, now it requires (some small) knowledge of thetidyverse
. As such, it is a clear disimprovement, and I would see rejecting the edit as a no-brainer. I honestly don't see any ideology at work here. (Then again, it's probably me that is the ideologue, and I just don't see it.) $\endgroup$