

Hadley Wickham, the Man Who Revolutionized R - kilbuz
http://priceonomics.com/hadley-wickham-the-man-who-revolutionized-r/

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peatmoss
Hadley is a strange amalgam of academic rigor, entrepreneurial gut feel, and
coding chops. Ggplot is as close to a perfect example of a library that I can
imagine that embodies these things. He started by doing an academic literature
review and seized upon a conceptual framework that is superior to every other
organic or ad hoc plotting concept out there. And, he correctly assessed that
there was a need for more powerful visualization in between "draw it all from
primitives" and "choose from one a handful of canned visualizations." Finally,
he executed it in fine form.

Rinse, spin, repeat with plyr and dplyr. And lubridate. And devtools. And ...
Well, you get the idea.

I got to meet Hadley briefly at a R meetup in Seattle. I lamely asked whether
he made it back to New Zealand much. What I really wanted to say was, "You're
my hero and how can I be like you?" But I couldn't figure out how to say that
without being creepy.

Hadley is aces as far as his contributions are concerned. But he's also a
great example of how to comport oneself online. I've never seen Hadley pull a
Torvalds. Thanks Hadley, you're one of the good ones!

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boxy310
His book is pretty fantastic, but I didn't realize he wrote half of the
packages I use.

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baldeagle
I could not recommend R without the Hadley packages. I started in R using
ggplot to replace a bunch of Excel graph reports.

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vixen99
"One of the attributes that has made me successful is that I am exquisitely
sensitive to frustration". And of course, he did something about it.

