@jonah and I have been talking about having a metapackage a la tidyverse to provide a convenient way to install and manage R Stan packages. I’ve been working on this for a bit, and I think this package is now ready for some real world usage/testing! I’m being a bit vague because I want the documentation/overall presentation to be critiqued as well.
Also, the name isn’t final, so please make suggestions! Some names we’ve thought of are:
stan
stanstack
stanflow
stanpkgs
stanalyze
but I must admit I have a soft spot for stanflow :). stanverse would be an obvious choice, but we thought its a bit too close to tidyverse and wanted to be a bit more distinct.
Looks interesting. Re names, stanflow sounds a bit Machine Learningy, like it might be Stan version of tensorflow. stanalyze sounds like an arviz type program for analyzing Stan results. Naming it just stan would lead to all sorts of confusion. So I would say stanpkgs and stanstack are good.
Thats’s a good point about stanflow and stanlyze. stanverse sounds a bit too close to tidyversewhich is why I’m hesitant, I wanted a little more distinction. However, this package does use a lot of the structure/code from the tidyverse package so maybe paying homage in the name itself isn’t too big of a deal.
+1 for “stanflow”. It feels like the right abbreviation for something whose full name is “An integrated Stan-based Bayesian workflow”. For consistent title case or sentence case, “integrated” and “workflow” should get the same capitalization.
What does “integrated” mean here? If you went to “istanflow” it’d sound like a dot-com boom era tech company :-).
In general, I don’t like portmanteaus like “stanverse” and “stanalyze” or “stanimal”, but other people seem just fine with them.
Bottom line is that it doesn’t really matter what your package is called if people can find it and it’s not offensive.
Let’s see what the nominator, @andrewgelman, thinks.
I’m a bit disappointed “stanimal” dropped out of the running so quickly… :)
@Bob_Carpenter Thanks for pointing out the wonky capitilzation, fixed it in the GH repo but I guess the preview here won’t update. I had also added “Mildly Opiniated” at some point. Its unwieldy now but I’ll fix that later.
The “integrated” bit was meant to convey the idea that stanflow should be your one-stop-shop for (most) everything Stan and R–it does a lot more then just loading bayesplot, loo, etc. E.g., right now I’m working on a function to properly cite all packages/functions used in a project or set of files, which is not a very “tidyverse” (package, not ecosystem) thing to do.
I do need to work on documentation, and maybe that’ll make the package’s role/capabilities clearer–especially if there’s a list of things stanflow can be used for. I don’t mind dropping “integrated” if you think it doesn’t say anything. Again, suggestions always welcome.