ggplot2

Pardon my shooting from the hip here, but IMO if you're using R for something radically different than statistical analysis and data visualization, you're probably better off using a tool/language that's more purpose-suited. > As someone who basically uses R as a nice LISP-y scripting language to orchestrate calling low-level compiled code from other languages When I read this, I think, would `bash` or something equally portable/universally installed work? R is a beautiful thing when limited to its core uses But in my experience, the more we build away from those core uses, the more brittleness we introduce. I wish the Posit team would focus on the core R experience, resolve some of the hundreds of open issues on its core packages in a timely way [0,1], and just generally play to R's strengths. [0] https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/is

Ah yeah, connecting the dots in ggplot2 docs is hard. It's hard for us to document because, under the hood, the pieces quite decoupled and different pieces are responsible for different arguments. But since we last took a deep dive on the ggplot2 docs, we've gotten much better at generating docs with code, so maybe it's time to have another look. I've filed an issue (https://github.com/tidyverse/ggplot2/issues/4770) so we don't forget about it, but no guarantees about when it might get done.

Extended release notes here[1] as well as an explanation of the new object system for extending it, ggproto, here[2] [1] https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/releases/tag/v2.0.0 [2] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggplot2/vignettes/ex...

Unfortunately, looking at stars/watchers as a metric is not as effective as it is for more popular languages. R has a lot of great software and community but the software development scene is not at all as populated as it is for Ruby/Python/JavaScript. Look at the repo for ggplot2, which is one of R's most generally useful and best-in-class libraries: https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2 Just 1,500 stars and 200 watchers...stars obviously aren't a reflection of the library's quality or value, but there's at least a correlation with how many people are on Github and who are tracking the package. I don't know what it's like to develop for CRAN, and it possibly has an advantage in that a maintainer has to work harder to get it on to CRAN than on to Github...but on the other hand, it doesn't seem as conducive to getting user feedback, which seem

Hadley is actively working on ggplot2. In fact, he just tweeted a list of improvements - https://twitter.com/hadleywickham/status/654283936755904512 https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/blob/master/NEWS.md

Bach is great on many counts - I did a visualization (https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/wiki/Bach-2-Part-Invention...) in R awhile back of a Two-part invention that reflects how well structured his counterpoint is.