The Fun in Functional Programming

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After some years as a Stata user, I found myself in a new position where the tools available were SQL and SPSS. I was impressed by the power of SQL, but I was unhappy with going back to SPSS after five years with Stata.

Luckily, I got the go-ahead from my leaders at the department to start testing out R as a tool to supplement SQL in data handling. This was in the beginning of 2020, and by March we were having a social gathering at our workplace. A Bingo night! Which turned out to be the last social event before the pandemic lockdown.

What better opportunity to learn a new programming language than to program some bingo cards! I learnt a lot from this little project. It uses the packages grid and gridExtra to prepare and embellish the cards.

The function BingoCard draws the cards and is called from the function Bingo3. When Bingo3 is called it runs BingoCard the number of times necessary to create the requested number of sheets and stores the result as a pdf inside a folder defined at the beginning of the script.

All steps could have been added together in a single function. For instance, a more complete function could have included input for the color scheme of the cards, the number of cards on each sheet and more advanced features for where to store the results. Still, this worked quite well, and was an excellent way of learning since it was both so much fun and gave me the opportunity to talk enthusiastically about R during Bingo Night.

library(gridExtra)
library(grid)
 


##################################################################
# Be sure to have a folder where results are stored
##################################################################

CardFolder <- "BingoCards"

if (!dir.exists(CardFolder)) {dir.create(CardFolder)}


##################################################################
# Create a theme to use for the cards
##################################################################

thema <- ttheme_minimal(
          base_size = 24, padding = unit(c(6, 6), "mm"),
          core=list(bg_params = list(fill = rainbow(5), 
                                     alpha = 0.5, 
                                     col="black"),
          fg_params=list(fontface="plain",col="darkblue")),
          colhead=list(fg_params=list(col="darkblue")),
          rowhead=list(fg_params=list(col="white")))


##################################################################
##  Define the function BingoCard
##################################################################

BingoCard <- function() {
  
  B <- sample(1:15,  5, replace=FALSE)
  I <- sample(16:30, 5, replace=FALSE)
  N <- sample(31:45, 5, replace=FALSE)
  G <- sample(46:60, 5, replace=FALSE)
  O <- sample(61:75, 5, replace=FALSE)
  
  BingoCard <- as.data.frame(cbind(B,I,N,G,O))
  
  BingoCard[3,"N"]<-"X"
  
  a <-  tableGrob(BingoCard, theme = thema)
  return(a)
}

##################################################################
##  Define the function Bingo3
##  The function has two arguments  
##  By default, 1 sheet with 3 cards is stored in the CardFolder   
##  The default name is "bingocards.pdf"
##  This function calls the BingoCard function
##################################################################

Bingo3 <- function(NumberOfSheets=1, SaveFileName="bingocards") {
  
  myplots <- list()
  N <- NumberOfSheets*3
  for (i in 1 : N   )      {     
    a1 <- BingoCard()
    myplots[[i]] <- a1 
  }
  ml <- marrangeGrob(myplots, nrow=3, ncol=1,top="")
  
  save_here <- paste0(CardFolder,"/",SaveFileName,".pdf")
  
  ggplot2::ggsave(save_here,  ml, device = "pdf", width = 210, 
                  height = 297, units = "mm")
}

##################################################################
##  Run Bingo3 with default values
##################################################################

Bingo3()

##################################################################
##  Run Bingo3 with custom values
##################################################################

Bingo3(NumberOfSheets = 30, SaveFileName = "30_BingoCards")