A Desiccated baseR-er’s Snowflakes via Base R Graphics

Yihui Xie 2017-12-05

As I said previously, I’m a desiccated baseR-er like Karl Broman, and I’m an unfortunate master of par(). Today I saw a lovely papa drew some beautiful snowflakes for his daughter using ggplot2.

I’m sorry for boring you, but… I haven’t drawn any plots for a long time, but par() is still in my memory, and here is the desiccated base R version of the snowflakes:

par(mar = rep(0, 4), bg = 'black', ann = FALSE)
n = 100
with(
  list(x = runif(n), y = runif(n), size = runif(n, 1, 7)),
  plot(x, y, pch = 42, cex = size, col = 'white')
)

Perhaps this is one of the rare examples in which base R code looks a little easier, and a grammar of graphics may be an overkill.