#rstats I think R beginners should get a good grounding in base-R, whether they go on from there to Tidy, data.table or neither, https://tinyurl.com/y3hv953l ">https://tinyurl.com/y3hv953l&... I fear that many are being taught only the fancy stuff, rendering them helpless on simple, commonplace tasks. For example:

I encountered a dataset today, which had a number of & #39;?& #39; entries instead of NA. That resulted in numeric cols. being char. And some cols. were constant except for & #39;?& #39;. In other words, typical messy data, NOT ADVANCED. And yet:

I wonder if typical graduates of base R-less classes would be able to (a) notice there is a problem and (b) fix it. I suspect that many current R courses teach only "sanitized" examples that make the students falsely feel empowered. /end