The trouble with ‘ntile()’

You keep using that function. I do not think it does what you think it does As longtime readers of this blog will no doubt be aware, I am a tidyverse girl. As deeply as I adore the R programming language, there are some wild things that are baked into the behaviour of base R, and a lot of what tidyverse does so very, very well is smooth over those rough edges. Whether it is data visualisation with ggplot2, data wrangling with dplyr, or navigating the hell that is string manipulation with stringr rather than grapple with the stunningly inconsistent base R regex tools, it has been a blessing. I don’t usually bother to write posts pointing out the obvious, though, so I’ve been more likely to write about a few of the less celebrated packages like fs and cli that sit underneath tidyverse and make everyone’s life a little less painful. In short, I am a fan. And so it is with a certain level of trepidation and regret that I find myself writing a post about something that a tidyverse package…