Yihui Xie, well-known within the R neighborhood because the creator of R packages reminiscent of R Markdown, knitr, blogdown, and bookdown, has been laid off from Posit, the place he labored as a full-time software program developer. Xie introduced the layoff, which occurred on the finish of December, in a weblog publish this week. He stated he would proceed working as a part-time contractor for Posit to keep up a few of his packages.
“I used to be fairly stunned however just for a brief second,” he wrote. “I absolutely revered Posit’s determination and rapidly accepted the conclusion that my contribution now not deserved a full-time job right here.”
Some R customers reacted with shock. “Completely devastating information. I might not have completed what I’ve completed within the final decade with out Yihui’s work on knitr,” analysis software program engineer Zhian N. Kamvar posted on Mastodon. “If you happen to’ve ever encountered a web site, report, or ebook constructed with RStats in current reminiscence, you will have Yihui to thank. Till he will get a brand new place, he is in search of sponsorship” on GitHub.
As of this afternoon, Xie had greater than 150 GitHub sponsors. (Disclosure: This listing consists of me; I used his bookdown package deal when writing my ebook Sensible R for Mass Communication and Journalism.)
Xie’s departure after 10 years at Posit is one other sign that the corporate, previously RStudio, is specializing in merchandise that supply interoperability between R and Python. An instance of the corporate’s current shift is the Quarto open supply technical publishing platform, introduced in 2022, which is language-agnostic and equally helps each R and Python, in addition to Julia and Observable JavaScript.
The corporate stated on the time that Quarto was the following era of R Markdown, though R Markdown wouldn’t go away. Nonetheless, customers had been advised to anticipate that cool new options can be focused at Quarto.
The month earlier than Xie was let go, Python pandas creator Wes McKinney joined Posit, additionally a sign that the corporate was severe about broadening its focus past R. McKinney stated on the time that he would “advocate for the wants of the PyData ecosystem in Posit’s work in addition to proceed advancing important open-source initiatives.”
Xie’s packages like R Markdown and knitr had been a key attraction for a lot of R customers, easing the duty of presenting the outcomes of information evaluation in participating methods. His work additionally aimed to “make R and reproducible analysis extra accessible”, Xie stated. His xaringan R Markdown extension, for instance, was an R implementation of the comment.js JavaScript library, permitting for interactive slide displays of R-based evaluation.
Xie stated Posit has “generously offered funding for me to proceed, as a contractor, to assist and prolong knitr, rmarkdown, and varied packages on this ecosystem. I stay up for persevering with my collaboration with the Posit group on our shared areas of curiosity.” The DT package deal shouldn’t be among the many packages being maintained, nevertheless. Xie stated that Posit plans to discover a new maintainer for that one.
“The top of a relationship typically doesn’t suggest something fallacious or a failure of both get together,” Xie wrote. “As a substitute, it could merely point out a mismatch, which is regular.”
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