[ESS] General question aboout literate statistical practice pipeline

[Hüsing, Johannes]

Dear all,
glad to notice that this list has become a bit more lively. I hope I won't derail the ongoing discussions by posing another, rather general question. The aim of literate programming seems to be to work on code and its documentation in parallel. One technique to achive this is to keep code and its documentation in close proximity.
In literal statistical practice (LSP), the results of the statistical analysis becomes another part of the output. The output is normally a side effect of running the program, while in classical literate programming the code needn't necessarily be executed in the tangling process. The term LSP, introduced by Anthony Rossini, did not quite catch on but the principle is similar
When I produce an analysis in the form of an LSP document, I tend to struggle with the arrangements of function definitions, which are normally documented for the underlying assumptions for my choice of model, and running the functions, which produces automatically generated documentation. When I keep definition and execution separated, the definition parts remain silent because nothing is "happening" yet. The narrative of what I am doing and why tends to fall apart.
One could say that putting the analysis into a package would solve my problem, because the functions will be documented in separate *.Rd files while the actual analysis can be put into a vignette. This would address my problem but at the cost of the overhead that package productions brings with it (even if I steer clear of devtools::check()).
Am I the only one around here or did anyone else encounter this problem? What is your generic pipeline for analyses done where methods are not run-of-the-mill?

Hope I could get my problem across.

Best

Johannes

PS sorry for any unrelated content my employer tacks to the end of this mail.

Dr. Johannes H�sing
Epidemiologie

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