Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 26, 2025

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: littler 0.3.21 on CRAN: Lots Moar Features!

  The twentysecond release of littler as a CRAN package landed on CRAN just now, following in the now nineteen year history (!!) as a (initially non-CRAN) package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.

  littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only began to do in recent years.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: crc32c 0.0.3 on CRAN: Accommodate Unreleased (!!) cmake Version

  A third release of the crc32c package is now on CRAN. The package bring the Google library crc32c to R and offers cyclical checksums with parity in hardware-accelerated form on (recent enough) intel cpus as well as on arm64.

• Rlang ☛ Collecting Stock Data Using R: A Quick Guide

  Collecting data can be a drudge for many tasks in economics or securities analysis. Fortunately, R has some good options available to streamline this task. Popular R Packages for Stock Data quantmod:The quantmod package is a favorite among financial analysts.

• Rlang ☛ Software Review, Perspectives from an Academic

  There’s an R package for this… right?

• Rlang ☛ Conformalize (improved prediction intervals and simulations) any R Machine Learning model with misc::conformalize

  A new function in the misc package allows you to perform conformal prediction with any R machine learning model. Conformal prediction improves prediction intervals' coverage rate thanks to held-out set cross-validation errors.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.4.25 on CRAN: Fix Bashism in Configure

  A new minor release 0.4.25 of RQuantLib arrived on CRAN this morning, and has just now been uploaded to Debian too.

  QuantLib is a rather comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance. RQuantLib connects (some parts of) it to the R environment and language, and has been part of CRAN for nearly twenty-two years (!!) as it was one of the first packages I uploaded to CRAN.

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2025.12 Red on RakuAST

    Fernando Correa de Oliveira has written a nice blog post about the future of Red (an ORM for Raku), and how that would be influenced by having RakuAST become mainstream: The Future of Red ORM for Raku (/r/rakulang comments).

• Python

  • Share Python Scripts Like a Pro: uv and PEP 723 for Easy Deployment

    Sharing single-file Python scripts with external dependencies is now effortless thanks to uv and PEP 723, which enable embedding dependency metadata directly within scripts. This approach eliminates the need for complex setup tools like requirements.txt or package managers, making script distribution and execution seamless and simplifying deployment while maintaining flexibility and efficiency.