R syllabus: Launch preparations?

[colinleach]

Continues #504

I think we're down to the last two items that need fixing/merging before we have something ready to launch:

• coordinate-transformation: possible functions exercise? #518, the exercise for the Functions concept, is currently being reviewed Update: now merged
• [New Concept] Dataframes draft #506 plus the trees-and-tibbleations exercise, where we accidentally stumbled into something quite advanced, beyond the scope of a dataframes introductory concept. That needs simplifying, I think.

With luck, that could all be done in the next couple of days.

Once the initial 20 concept/exercise pairs are on the Exercism website, I'd like to go through the about.md files and add more cross-reference links to other concepts.

Once we are ready to press the button, I guess we will need to edit config.json:`

• "concept-exercises": true
• exercises to "status": "beta"

Having other maintainers sanity-check it might be nice, but I don't think that's possible.

@BethanyG, I've tried to avoiding dragging you into the murky details of dozens of PRs, but we may be approaching a stage you'll want to comment on?

Of course, there's lots more to do post-launch (pivoting and grouping! relational joins! correlations and linear models!). Another issue for another day.

[colinleach]

Tempting fate, I've created #521 with (most of) the changes to config.json. The linter seems happy with everything, which is the main check I wanted to run.

[colinleach]

Both the fixes mentioned above are now merged. We have 20 concept-exercise pairs, in a single connected tree.

My gut instinct is to rush into making it live, but my head says wait till tomorrow:

• last-minute checks
• Exercism is pretty dead on a Sunday, so there may be more people around to fix any problems on a weekday

Thoughts?

[depial]

Yeah, I'm for waiting too.

I don't currently see Dataframes in the syllabus (but the update to Trees & Tibble-ations went through).

[colinleach]

Still no dataframes on the syllabus page, but links to the concept and the exercise work correctly. We always seem to get these random glitches at bad moments.

Merging #521 (tomorrow!) may be enough to free it. If I get chance, I'll also update some of the links.json files: several of them were thrown together in a rush and could use some love.

[colinleach]

I accidentally launched the syllabus by pressing the wrong button (sorry).

I've posted on the Discord maintainers channel, to ask if it looks OK to people who aren't R maintainers. If feedback is positive, I'll announce it on the Forum.

[colinleach]

András confirms he can see it, so I'll go ahead with the Forum post.

[colinleach]

We seem to be getting feedback on the Discord maintainers channel:. This link might work.

Getting the very early concepts right can be difficult: we have to deal with a wider spectrum of students (before many of them drop out).

[depial]

Yeah, that assignment operator mess is a bit of a pain. If I recall, we talk about it again later, maybe when talking about = and arguments? I'm just not sure when/if that comes up again.

Edit: It looks like what I was remembering was in the about.md but didn't make it to the introduction.md.