What Yihui Xie thinks about innovation

@yihui-xie · 11 positions · On ppll ↗

Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

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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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1. 15 May 2026

   Our readingA tool's popularity can become a self-reinforcing network effect rather than a sign of technical merit.

   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