Interview of Hadley Wickham (woot)

The real purpose of this blog, you may not have realised, is to have a place to put things where I can conveniently find them again.  Am in the middle of an interview of Hadley Wickham by Will Chase, an interview in which HW (we are not worthy) says:

So I think for a long time there was this big pool of people that could potentially be contributing, but they were really put off by R-help (note: R-help is a notoriously hostile mailing list and was the only way to get help with R in the early days). And then the timing was lucky enough that there were two significant changes that allowed the community to reinvent itself to some degree.

The first of those was StackOverflow. It seems hard to imagine now, but at the time, StackOverflow was so incredibly welcoming and friendly. And I think part of that was that in contrast to R-help, anything would seem welcoming and friendly, 

This made me laugh, because I had spent countless hours trawling through installments of the R-help mailing list, and the principal contributors of answers (Brian Ripley, Uwe Ligges, Duncan Murdoch, Peter Dalgaard, others I could once have named without thinking) were often very severe. But after one had trawled through HUNDREDS of installments one couldn't help but be struck by the generosity of contributors who kept answering question after question for months, years on end.  To this day I feel an affection for Ripley, Ligges and all (the mere name Uwe Ligges has only to come to mind to make me smile), an affection yet to be inspired by professional contacts who are EXTREMELY friendly and dodge questions like so many bullets. 

The whole thing here (this is, of course, the link I want in a convenient place).

The Hadleyverse

Most of my time, these days, is taken up with dealing with the * it would be professional suicide to report. 

Not so sure discretion is the better part of valor, but there are wheels within wheels within wheels.

Meanwhile I am tormented by an alternative universe. The Hadleyverse. 

This is probably a case where ignorance is bliss. If you don't know about the Hadleyverse, you are probably better off not knowing.  If you're not already programming in R, if you're not already getting the hang of ggplot2, if you haven't installed RStudio and been repeatedly dazzled by all the amazing things you now can do that were a headache in basic R -- if you haven't THEN been seduced by Shiny, if you've never grappled with data and then discovered that Mr Fabulous has released a package or 3 that addresses most-to-all of the problems that were driving you berserk--

If you've never followed this path you probably DON'T want to know more about Hadley Wickham. You're mired down in a professional environment where solving problems is nobody's business. It may well be driving you crazy, but at least you don't have an example of a world where things can be different.

So this is bad, bad, bad, very bad, but there's a terrific profile of Hadley Wickham on Priceonomics, which I am now sharing with people who might well be happier if they knew nothing about it.  The whole thing here.