Hadley Wickham, the Man Who Revolutionized R

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!

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

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

"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.