> Mostly I think Prof. Matloff is forgetting that base R is kinda terrible and no one else has done much about it aside from RStudio.
I think he'd disagree with the contention that base R is kinda terrible. Like, I'm pretty sure he's wrong. But this isn't something he's forgotten, it's something he's never believed.
The point about the Tidyverse and RStudio is that RStudio doesn't make any of its revenue from the Tidyverse. They distribute it free. There are no upsells for any of it -- I can't go out and buy ggplot2 add ons, I can't buy dplyr support contracts. There's no money to be made on the Tidyverse, and plenty of resources thrown at it.
So what is RStudio selling? They sell an IDE, they sell servers to host things built in R, they sell a package manager solution, they offer most of these things as a SaaS offering as well (although rstudio.cloud is still in trial and they haven't started charging yet).
In other words, RStudio offers tooling for people who write R. They don't really care what kind of R you're writing, from a financial perspective. They get paid the same if you're using RStudio to write stuff using data.table as they get paid if you use dplyr. RStudio is making a bet that more people will want to write R code if they make R a more pleasant language to work in. And anecdotally, they're absolutely right -- I tried to learn R before the Tidyverse, and I hated every moment of it. I like post-Tidyverse R (although I got into it when people still called it the Hadleyverse). I know several other people with similar experiences to mine.
If you don't think base R is kinda terrible then I recommend you read R Inferno. It's truly a crazy language with enough footguns for a centipede. A lot of the attraction to the tidyverse is having sane defaults and consistent APIs that help you do the right thing quickly.
I think he'd disagree with the contention that base R is kinda terrible. Like, I'm pretty sure he's wrong. But this isn't something he's forgotten, it's something he's never believed.
The point about the Tidyverse and RStudio is that RStudio doesn't make any of its revenue from the Tidyverse. They distribute it free. There are no upsells for any of it -- I can't go out and buy ggplot2 add ons, I can't buy dplyr support contracts. There's no money to be made on the Tidyverse, and plenty of resources thrown at it.
So what is RStudio selling? They sell an IDE, they sell servers to host things built in R, they sell a package manager solution, they offer most of these things as a SaaS offering as well (although rstudio.cloud is still in trial and they haven't started charging yet).
In other words, RStudio offers tooling for people who write R. They don't really care what kind of R you're writing, from a financial perspective. They get paid the same if you're using RStudio to write stuff using data.table as they get paid if you use dplyr. RStudio is making a bet that more people will want to write R code if they make R a more pleasant language to work in. And anecdotally, they're absolutely right -- I tried to learn R before the Tidyverse, and I hated every moment of it. I like post-Tidyverse R (although I got into it when people still called it the Hadleyverse). I know several other people with similar experiences to mine.