Rewrite DW-NOMINATE in R

[wmay]

This is an ambitious and longer-term goal, but it would have a big payoff. Having DW-NOMINATE written in R (or at least mostly in R) would:

• make package maintenance easier
• make the code easier to understand and modify/extend
• solve some licensing issues

There's no telling if I will actually do this. But it would be cool if I did.

Edit: The code from the (abandoned?) pynominate project is much easier to follow. Using that as a guide, converting it to R may not be so hard. https://github.com/voteview/pynominate

[davidycliao]

thank you for contributing it. this package is often used in ESS scaling course. :D

[wmay]

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. Maybe I should take that course 😅