why on earth is it called 'tibble'?

tidyverse
1

Hey,

simple question: why are tibbles called 'tibble'?

:blush:

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A simple Google search leads to the following:

Why the name “tibble”? Tibbles first appeared in the dplyr package in January 2014, but they weren’t called “tibbles” yet. dplyr used a subclass tbl_df for its dataframe objects and they behaved like modern tibbles: Better printing, not converting strings to factors, etc. We loved them, and we would convert our plain-old dataframes into these tbl_df s for these features. However, the name tee-bee-ell-dee-eff is quite a mouthful. On Twitter, @JennyBryan raised the question of how to pronounce tbl_df , and @kevin_ushey suggested “tibble diff”. The name was enthusiastically received.

Source: A tour of the tibble package - Higher Order Functions

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Thanks! Sorry, I completely missed that "why name tibble R" etc. diddn't lead me there though :wink:

4

"Tibble" is how New Zealanders pronounce "table"... Hadley is a Kiwi... the rest is history.

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that should go in the package description x)

7

Yes. Naming things is hard :slight_smile:

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So, as it is opened, where are the benefits of d tibbles, If I may?

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It's described pretty succinctly here:

From the tibble docs:

A tibble , or tbl_df , is a modern reimagining of the data.frame, keeping what time has proven to be effective, and throwing out what is not. Tibbles are data.frames that are lazy and surly: they do less (i.e. they don’t change variable names or types, and don’t do partial matching) and complain more (e.g. when a variable does not exist). This forces you to confront problems earlier, typically leading to cleaner, more expressive code. Tibbles also have an enhanced print() method which makes them easier to use with large datasets containing complex objects.

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So, they look cool?
or tey do show a benefit?

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hey plz don't abuse my poor thread :wink: I think the benefits of tibbles are pretty well documented (thx mara for referencing the relevant sources). I really just felt a bit weird about introducing ppl to the tidyverse and talking about tibbles without having an explanation for the slightly strange name x)

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Put a smile on my face :slight_smile: I still remember the way Hadley pronounced "nisted" in one of his YT videos about "nested" data frames

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I also suspect a little influence of this Star Trek character:

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CvZZtIhXgAQY05I900×1200 143 KB

Tribbles look cute initially, but then they multiply, take over EVERYTHING and generally cause trouble.

See also the Star Trek font on the hex sticker...

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Oh my god, this is getting better every day! I kind of wondered why the hexsticker would be so spacy but my ST knowledge was definitely not even nearly sufficient to make that connection. I wonder what comes next ...

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15

sometimes naming collisions are happy little accidents :slight_smile:

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Is the fact that there’s TI 33 in the logo a nod to Texas Instruments calculator of the same name?

18

good one although I am slowly noticing the creepy stench of spurious correlation here ...

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19

Well, I was expecting something cool, but not that cool.
could you please make an annotated dictionary of the tidyverse, at some point?
Of course it wont help learners, but practitioners will love it
cheers
Fer