Many R users may have heard this morning that Duncan Murdoch has stepped down from the R Core Team and from the R Foundation. He no longer maintains the Windows R binaries, either.
I haven’t had much interaction with Duncan on a personal basis. I think we have met only once at Interface 2012, where I complained about the old-fashioned R homepage to him. I’m definitely not the right person to summarize his enormous contributions to the R world, but after hearing that he was leaving the R Core Team, I briefly recalled what I knew about him in my mind.
If I can only mention one thing in this post, it would be R package vignettes. I mean the non-Sweave vignettes. This would not be possible without Duncan’s support and Henrik Bengtsson’s hard work. An R package vignette can be an extremely helpful (to users) and convenient (to authors) documentation format, and is a great companion to R help pages.
It was one of my most exciting moments when I learned that non-Sweave vignettes were going to be supported in R 3.0.0. I think it is fairly clear today that limiting R package authors to Sweave in vignettes was not a good idea. Not many authors actually cared to write vignettes when Sweave was the only option, since it basically means you have to write in LaTeX.
Supporting non-Sweave vignettes opened the door wide. It seems we don’t really need to persuade package authors that vignettes are important or helpful. When they realize they can write a package vignette in R Markdown, they will just write one. As of today, there have been 2475 packages with 3777 vignettes based on knitr on CRAN. There may be more vignettes not generated via knitr. Needless to say, I’m truly happy to see these numbers.
Appendix: My Bragging Rights
Duncan has submitted a few pull requests to the knitr repo on GitHub. When he reported the bug yihui/knitr#1309, I thought to myself if it was possible to get an R Core member to submit a GitHub pull request (base R is still developed in SVN). I really wanted to show that one did not have to master GIT before one can submit a pull request, because everything can be done through the GitHub web interface, and no command-line is required. And he made it, and again, and again.
I guess stepping down from R Core does not mean Duncan is leaving the R community, so I’m looking forward to his continued contributions in the future. Thanks for the great service and contributions over the past many years, Duncan!