Does every language have many of its main third party packages that are heavily influenced by the work of one person? Wickham is to R as John Resig is to JavaScript, if Resig were to have also created and primarily maintained D3, moment.js, and Grunt...Wickham not only steers the libraries that define how a growing majority of R users do data manipulation (dplyr) and visualization, he&#x27;s also building the tools he needs to maintain and publish them (devtools).<p>This isn&#x27;t to say that there aren&#x27;t other programmers doing brilliant work in R (also, R is just a smaller community overall), but he&#x27;s devoting significant time to building out support tools and frameworks...this suggests that he is a total mensch, but also that there was a significant need that hadn&#x27;t yet been addressed.