What Yihui Xie thinks about design
Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.
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.
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1 dated position, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Yihui Xie has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Our readingNeeding 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