Unlike point-and-click or GUI based statistical programs, the R language requires practice so that programming skills continue to get developed and committed to human memory. Programming skills directly relate to R as a language, and computing languages work when humans use them to solve problems. However, in the process of conducting research, a solo researcher needs to call upon several skills, of which statistical computing is only one. When a solo author pulls together an entire project and begins analyzing data, some skills will be donned and doffed at particular moments in the process, such as statistical computing. Therefore, since programming skills will inevitably be put down and picked back up during the research process, computing practice is essential to refresh the suite of human ability to call upon the R language. At its simplest, R can be thought of as a language of nouns and verbs, with respective activities belonging to each class of language component (Wickham &