#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  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 '?' entries instead of NA. That resulted in numeric cols. being char. And some cols. were constant except for '?'. 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