![]() ![]() In 2020, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel was working with another author on a statistics textbook, using R and a formatting language called R Markdown to calculate numbers, create figures and format the final document. “If you ran the same code with an older version of R and a newer version of R and it was using any function that needed to generate a random number, you would end up getting different results,” says Tiffany Timbers, a data scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.Īmong other things, that kind of variability can complicate collaboration (see ‘Environmental testing’). This and the older algorithm both work, but not in the same way. ![]() Version 3.6.0 of the R programming language, for instance, introduced a replacement algorithm for generating random numbers. When developers tweak their individual pieces, this can change the function of the software that depends on them, potentially altering results - or causing the software to fail. Research software is like the tower-building game Jenga - tools atop tools atop tools. ![]()
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