Enhancing R: The Vision and Impact of Jan Vitek’s MaintainR Initiative
The R Consortium recently interviewed Jan Vitek, a professor at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He specializes in programming languages, compilers, and systems. Notably, he developed one of the first real-time Java virtual machines in collaboration with Boeing, which involved writing the navigation software of a ScanEagle UAV in Java and demonstrating that it out-performed the legacy version of the system written in C++. Vitek is actively involved in the programming language community and has held multiple leadership roles, including chairing SIGPLAN. In his spare time Vitek is a cinephile with a presence on Letterboxd and is the human of a dog named Olaf.
Vitek has been working on R for a decade. He is currently working on the MaintainR 2021 project, which aims to support and update the key components of the R ecosystem. The R Consortium is funding this project.
“When does a programming language die?” is the wrong question. Languages do not die, they slowly fade into irrelevance. A language fades away when no longer deemed useful enough for people to learn it and convince their colleagues to adopt it in their work and to maintain software projects written in it. Why does this happen? It comes about when newer languages that are better or appear cooler, start to emerge. The rise of Python has shifted many machine learning users from R to Python. The success of Julia has pushed performance-sensitive users to develop new mathematical libraries in this new language. Is R fading?
