RAP; a 10 year journey

I found the earliest possible reference that I ever made to RAP in a document, part of an evaluation report I submitted nearly 10 years ago. At the time I wrote it I had hoped that it would be ceased on by the people who read it as an obviously important innovation, but I can see now that change is not so easily won. Anyway, just for fun, here it is, June 25th 2012, written in Sweave before all that newfangled RMarkdown (even that’s not newfangled now! Quarto!).

“\subsection{A note on reporting methodology}

This report is \emph{reproducible}. This means that the tables and graphs within it are produced not by cutting and pasting from separate software packages but instead generated using open source computer code and automatically laid out and inserted into the document.

The advantage of working in this way is it allows the report to be re-produced given a different set of data in seconds instead of days. This report can therefore very easily be submitted in subsequent years, with the new data loaded into the program and all of the new tables and figures automatically generated. The text, naturally, would need to be re-written, although it may be felt that the analysis stands on its own and the whole exercise of reporting could therefore be carried out and completed in less than one day at zero cost, if the data were made available.”

Here’s to another 10 years of innovation and change 🙌‍