Yihui Xie, the useR! 2014 Interview

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. – Michael Crichton

Yihui Xie intended to make it easier to do his homework, but instead found himself tackling one of the greatest problems in modern science: the reproducibility of results.

What is Reproducibility?

Reproducibility is one of the main principles of the scientific method, and refers to the ability of a test or experiment to be accurately reproduced, or replicated, by someone else working independently.

Through his work on the knitR package, he has assembled a toolchain which allows the user to produce beautiful, ready-to-distribute documents containing a whole, self-supporting, and reproducible analysis. By leveraging powerful constructs such as adaptive, nearly transparent caching, Yihui has removed the barriers which have prevented many practitioners from fully addressing reproducibility in their work. Reproducible documents are now flexible, powerful, and fast. No single R package has impacted my personal workflow in the past decade as deeply as knitR has, moving the task of updating analyses with more current data from a chore to a pleasure. Previously, presenting a data story in a flowing document required completing an array of invisible processes plus the usual copy/paste engineering in order to create an incomplete picture of the analysis and code used to produce it. Now, a single living knitR project can now be created in-line and shared in its entirety, as either a PDF, a git repository, or even a living Shiny document, giving my audience a nearly total understanding of the process by which I arrived at my solution. In this interview, Yihui discusses how he came to the R programming language and how he set about building knitR. He also mentions the great momentum and energy of the R community in China, and what he’s currently focused on at RStudio.

Video Breakdown

Please click here to see the video directly on youtube. Or if you prefer, subscribe to our podcast to get the audio!

Inspiration for Building knitR

We began this conversation by asking about the knitR package and it’s origins. How does one wake up and decide to build the single best implementation of Knuth’s literate programming? The same way you eat an elephant, one bite at a time.

R Community in China

Yihui isn’t only a world class software developer and visionary, he’s also helped organize the R community in China since 2006. The Chinese R conference, started in 2008, has also grown in stature and attendance as the community has grown. The 7th R China conference, held on May 24th and 25th, 2014 and hosted at Yihui’s alma mater, Renmin University in Beijing, had over twice as many attendees as the global useR! 2014 conference in Los Angeles, for example.

Advice to new programmers

Yihui provides some fantastic advice for new programmers on how to get involved in R. His advice transcends just R development however, and should be seen as great advice for anyone wanting to get involved in programming and technology. He advises a non-traditional path to mastery, focusing on the tools and techniques that make R visually and experientially appealing.