The Shape of Code

I am someone who regularly uses R, and my interest in programming languages means that on a semi-regular basis spend time reading blog posts about the language. Over the last year, or so, I had noticed several patterns of behavior, and after reading a recent blog post things started to make sense (the blog post gets a lot of things wrong, but more of that later).

What are the patterns that have caught my attention?

Some background: Hadley Wickham is the guy behind some very useful R packages. Hadley was an academic, and is now the chief scientist at RStudio, the company behind the R language specific IDE of the same name. As Hadley’s thinking about how to manipulate data has evolved, he has created new packages, and has been very prolific. The term Hadley-verse was coined to describe an approach to data manipulation and program structuring, based around use of packages written by the man.

For the last nine-months I have noticed that the term Tidyverse is being used more regularly to describe what had been the Hadley-verse. And???

Another thing that has become very noticeable, over the last six-months, is the extent to which a wide range of packages now have dependencies on packages in the HadleyTidyverse. And???

A recent post by Norman Matloff complains about the Tidyverse’s complexity (and about the consistency between its packages; which I had always thought was a good design principle), and how RStudio’s promotion of the Tidyverse could result in it becoming the dominant R world view. Matloff has an academic world view and misses what is going on.

RStudio, the company, need to sell their services (their IDE is clunky and will be wiped out if a top of the range product, such as Jetbrains, adds support for R). If R were simple to use, companies would have less need to hire external experts. A widely used complicated library of packages is a god-send for a company looking to sell R services.

I don’t think Hadley Wickam intentionally made things complicated, any more than the creators of the Microsoft server protocols added interdependencies to make life difficult for competitors.

A complex package ecosystem was probably not part of RStudio’s product vision, at least for many years. But sooner or later, RStudio management will have realised that simplicity and ease of use is not in their interest.

Once a collection of complicated packages exist, it is in RStudio’s interest to get as many other packages using them, as quickly as possible. Infect the host quickly, before anybody notices; all the while telling people how much the company is investing in the community that it cares about (making lots of money from).

Having this package ecosystem known as the Hadley-verse gives too much influence to one person, and makes it difficult to fire him later. Rebranding as the Tidyverse solves these problems.

Matloff accuses RStudio of monopoly behavior, I would have said they are fighting for survival (i.e., creating an environment capable of generating the kind of income a VC funded company is expected to make). Having worked in language environments where multiple, and incompatible, package ecosystems existed, I can see advantages in there being a monopoly. Matloff is also upset about a commercial company swooping in to steal their precious, a common academic complaint (academics swooping in to steal ideas from commercially developed software is, of course, perfectly respectable). Matloff also makes claims about teachability of programming that are not derived from any experimental evidence, but then everybody makes claims about programming languages without there being any experimental evidence.

RStudio management rode in on the data science wave, raising money from VCs. The wave is subsiding and they now need to appear to have a viable business (so they can be sold to a bigger fish), which means there has to be a visible market they can sell into. One way to sell in an open source environment is for things to be so complicated, that large companies will pay somebody to handle the complexity.