Yihui Xie
Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Yihui Xie did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
-
Their wordsA great many (perhaps the vast majority) of open-source software developers are unpaid and even unnoticed.
- 1 day earlier
-
Their wordsWebP is typically 25-35% smaller than PNG at equivalent visual quality, useful for HTML reports where file size matters
- 2 months earlier
-
Their wordsOnce you commit to HTML, an enormous amount of complexity simply evaporates.
↗The lt Package: Lightweight HTML Tables for R (and Beyond)yihui.org
- 8 weeks earlier
-
Their wordsI still believe that unit testing should be nothing more than "tell me if something unexpected happened."
↗Converting testthat Tests to testityihui.org 1st of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordsThe point is a user is looking for help, and a maintainer is willing to help and knows a solution. They are all real humans. You guys are hurting them by closing and deleting the question.
-
Their wordsThe popularity feeds the tooling, and the tooling feeds the popularity. That's not a technical argument-it's a network effect.
↗Converting testthat Tests to testityihui.org 2nd of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordsAll they need before they can truly appreciate empathy and humanity is one thing: have one of their own posts closed and deleted by another group of gatekeepers.
-
Our reading
Needing to mock code in tests often signals an underlying design problem that refactoring would fix.
Their wordsunless the code is completely out of your control, the need for mocking often indicates a design problem-consider refactoring to make the code easier to test directly.
↗Converting testthat Tests to testityihui.org 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 12 days earlier
-
Their wordsSkill-wise, most software developers, as long as they are willing/able to pay for AI assistants, are on the same page now.
↗Reflections on AI-assisted Programmingyihui.org 1st of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordsGoing forward, I think the future will be filled with software abundance, or, more accurately, I'd call it "software proliferation". That is, centralized development will be history. Software will be highly personalized, especially for open source software.
↗Reflections on AI-assisted Programmingyihui.org 2nd of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordsWe owe a debt, not to companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google, but to the authors of the free public raw materials that were used to train AI.
↗Reflections on AI-assisted Programmingyihui.org 3rd of 3 in this piece