Site icon R-bloggers

Watch 18 years of R development in 15 minutes

[This article was first published on Revolutions, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

R is an incredibly active software project. Since the first code was checked into Subversion back on 18 September 1997, there have been more than 100,000 updates to the R sources by the 20-some members of the R Core Team. As you can see from the activity graphs from the GitHub mirror of the R sources, the pace of development has been frequent and steady over the lifetime of the project:

It's hard to get a sense of the pace of activity from that chart alone, but Matt Dowle (he of the data.table package) published this mesmerizing visualization of R development to YouTube:

 

Matt created this visualization using Gource, using the aforementioned R GitHub mirror as a data source. It's cool to see all of the R developers moving around the source code tree as it grows over time. If you'd like to drill down into the individual contributors, Romain Francois has some R code and charts (created in 2009) that do exactly that. 

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Revolutions.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.