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> There are many talented developers in R but it's not quite a deep open-source ecosystem and community yet. Every language has third party packages that are p

• danso 11y ago
  Does every language have many of its main third party packages that are heavily influenced by the work of one person? Wickham is to R as John Resig is to JavaScript, if Resig were to have also created and primarily maintained D3, moment.js, and Grunt...Wickham not only steers the libraries that define how a growing majority of R users do data manipulation (dplyr) and visualization, he's also building the tools he needs to maintain and publish them (devtools). This isn't to say that there aren't other programmers doing brilliant work in R (also, R is just a smaller community overall), but he's devoting significant time to building out support tools and frameworks...this suggests that he is a total mensch, but also that there was a significant need that hadn't yet been addressed.
  • grayclhn 11y ago
    I would argue that most of the scientific & statistical packages for most languages are driven by at most a handful of people, yes. Another interpretation is that R is an incredibly productive language for this sort of programming, otherwise one person couldn't write so much useful code. ;)
  • hadley 11y ago
    It does help that I'm one of the few people who are paid to work full-time on nothing but open source R packages that a designed to broadly aid data analysis.