Today, I answered a StackOverflow question where the author was implementing a function for finding the mean of a continuous random variable, given its probability density function (PDF). In the process of writing up my answer, I ended up applying some functional programming techniques (specifically function factories).

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about starting a “data science-y” blog. In the aftermath of rstudio::conf this year, I finally decided it was time to act on those thoughts, and put something out there.

As I wrote before, I’m going to be working through some problems that caught my interest in Hadley Wickham’s second edition of Advanced R. I’m starting off with the functional programming chapter, where an exercise that literally made me go “wow” was a major source of inspiration for me to start this blog – I’m talking about Exercise 2 in Section 9.