Dataviz and the 20th Anniversary of R, an Interview With Hadley Wickham

Catching up with the creator of ggplot and tidyr about community, Tidyverse, and what’s in store for R over the next 20 years

On February 29th, 2000, R 1.0.0 was released to the world. At the time, it was a niche language for statisticians; now, over 20 years later, it has grown into a fully-featured programming language that is used by millions of people and has had incalculable influence in the world of data science and visualization.

R, along with Python, is one of the primary languages used today for data science and visualization. It has its roots in academia and is still widely used by researchers across nearly all disciplines, but the reach of R has expanded greatly in recent years. R has now been adopted by journalists around the world as a go-to choice for data wrangling and visualization, and by various industries where it powers AI models and data science products at some of the worlds largest companies.

Among the R community, Hadley Wickham is a celebrity. He is the creator of the seminal charting library ggplot, data wrangling libraries such as dplyr and tidyr, and a frequent target of extremely niche R memes. He currently works as chief scientist at Rstudio, where he leads a…