Formerly | RStudio Inc, RStudio PBC |
---|---|
Company type | Private |
Industry | Software publishing and SaaS platforms |
Founded | 2009 |
Founder | |
Headquarters | Boston, Massachusetts, US |
Key people | |
Products |
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Website | posit |
Posit PBC (or Posit) is an open-source data science software company. It is a public-benefit corporation [1] founded by J. J. Allaire, [2] creator of the programming language ColdFusion.
Posit has no formal connection to the R Foundation, a not-for-profit organization located in Vienna, Austria, [3] which is responsible for overseeing development of the R environment for statistical computing.
Posit was formerly known as RStudio Inc. In July 2022, it announced that it changed its name to Posit, to signify its broadening exploration towards other programming languages such as Python. [4]
Before the company started, Allaire initially started RStudio, the integrated development environment (IDE), as an open source project. [5] He recruited Joe Cheng to help work on this project, who would eventually become Posit's CTO. [6] Moreover, Cheng would conceptualize and develop the Shiny web framework in 2012. [7]
In August 2012, Hadley Wickham, Winston Chang, and Garrett Grolemund joined Posit (at the time RStudio Inc.). Wickham was known for working on packages such as ggplot2 and plyr. Chang was known for also working on ggplot2, and publishing the book R Graphics Cookbook. Grolemund was known for working on the lubridate R package, which makes working with dates and time data types easier. [8]
In November 2013, Yihui Xie joined Posit to work on the Shiny package. He created the knitr, cranvas, and animation packages, among others. [9]
In November 2016, Jenny Bryan and Max Kuhn joined Posit. Bryan was an associate professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She worked on R packages like googlesheets and was part of the leadership team at rOpenSci, an organization to help develop more R tools for the scientific community. Kuhn, formerly senior director of nonclinical statistics at Pfizer and co-author of the book Applied Predictive Modeling, was hired to improve the statistical modeling capabilities in the tidyverse. [10]
In January 2020, it was announced that RStudio Inc. would be restructured to be a public benefit corporation, RStudio PBC. RStudio is privately held, and venture capital firm General Catalyst owns a minority stake in the company. [11]
In July 2022, it was announced at the annual company conference, rstudio::conf, that RStudio PBC will be renamed to Posit PBC. The name change was to signal an expansion in focus among its products and services beyond R, such as Python. Previously, the "RStudio" brand made it more difficult for Python users to convert to using their products. [12] Posit's commercial products were renamed Posit Connect, Posit Workbench, and Posit Package Manager. [13]
In November 2023, Wes McKinney, creator of the Python package pandas, joined Posit as a principal architect. He was hired to advocate for the needs of the Python data ecosystem at Posit. [14]
In December 2023, Xie was laid off. In his time at Posit, Xie worked on R packages such as R Markdown, knitr, blogdown, and bookdown. [15] [16]
Posit has a range of free and open-source products, along with its personal and enterprise solutions offering both free and paid plans.
Posit hosts conferences for the R developer community. They include a general conference (posit::conf, formerly rstudio::conf) and a Shiny developer conference.
Date | Location | Name | Link | Talks | References/notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
January 13 - January 14, 2017 | Orlando, FL | rstudio::conf 2017 | Website | First RStudio conference | |
January 31 - February 3, 2018 | San Diego, CA | rstudio::conf 2018 | Website | ||
January 15 - January 18, 2019 | Austin, TX | rstudio::conf 2019 | Website | ||
January 27 - January 30, 2020 | San Francisco, CA | rstudio::conf 2020 | Website | ||
January 21, 2021 | Online | rstudio::global(2021) | Website | ||
July 25 - July 28, 2022 | Washington D.C. | rstudio::conf(2022) | Talks | RStudio rebrands to Posit [13] [18] | |
September 17 - September 20, 2023 | Chicago, IL | posit::conf(2023) | Talks | ||
August 12 - August 14, 2024 | Seattle, WA | posit::conf(2024) |
R is a programming language for statistical computing and data visualization. It has been adopted in the fields of data mining, bioinformatics, and data analysis.
Komodo Edit is a free and open source text editor for dynamic programming languages. It was introduced in January 2007 to complement ActiveState's commercial Komodo IDE. As of version 4.3, Komodo Edit is built atop the Open Komodo project. Komodo IDE is no longer supported and maintained by developers for Python.
ggplot2 is an open-source data visualization package for the statistical programming language R. Created by Hadley Wickham in 2005, ggplot2 is an implementation of Leland Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics—a general scheme for data visualization which breaks up graphs into semantic components such as scales and layers. ggplot2 can serve as a replacement for the base graphics in R and contains a number of defaults for web and print display of common scales. Since 2005, ggplot2 has grown in use to become one of the most popular R packages.
RStudio IDE is an integrated development environment for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. It is available in two formats: RStudio Desktop is a regular desktop application while RStudio Server runs on a remote server and allows accessing RStudio using a web browser. The RStudio IDE is a product of Posit PBC.
knitr is a software engine for dynamic report generation with R. It is a package in the programming language R that enables integration of R code into LaTeX, LyX, HTML, Markdown, AsciiDoc, and reStructuredText documents. The purpose of knitr is to allow reproducible research in R through the means of literate programming. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
Hadley Alexander Wickham is a New Zealand statistician known for his work on open-source software for the R statistical programming environment. He is the chief scientist at Posit PBC and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University. His work includes the data visualisation system ggplot2 and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages for data science based on the concept of tidy data.
Architect is an open-source integrated development environment (IDE), based on Eclipse. It serves as a multi-purpose workbench for data scientists, by providing support for various programming languages and technologies.
Joseph J. Allaire, better known professionally as J. J. Allaire, is an American-born software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He created the ColdFusion programming language and web application server, founded Allaire Corporation, OnFolio, FitNow, and RStudio, and created LoseIt! and Windows Live Writer. Allaire is currently the founder and CEO of statistical computing company Posit.
Wes McKinney is an American software developer and businessman. He is the creator and "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL) of the open-source pandas package for data analysis in the Python programming language, and has also authored three versions of the reference book Python for Data Analysis. He's also the creator of Apache Arrow, a cross-language development platform for in-memory data, and Ibis, a unified Python dataframe API. He was the CEO and founder of technology startup Datapad. He was a software engineer at Two Sigma Investments. He founded Ursa Labs, which, in 2021, became part of Voltron Data. In 2022, it was announced that Voltron Data had raised $110 million.
Yihui Xie (谢益辉) is a Chinese software developer who previously worked for Posit PBC. He is the principal author of the open-source software package Knitr for data analysis in the R programming language, and has also written the book Dynamic Documents with R and knitr.
Julia Silge is an American data scientist and software engineer. She has developed tools for statistical modelling in the R programming language, including the text mining package tidytext. Silge currently works for Posit PBC, formerly known as RStudio PBC.
Project Jupyter is a project to develop open-source software, open standards, and services for interactive computing across multiple programming languages.
Jennifer "Jenny" Bryan is a data scientist and an associate professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia where she developed the Master in Data Science Program. She is a statistician and software engineer at RStudio from Vancouver, Canada and is known for creating open source tools which connect R to Google Sheets and Google Drive.
The tidyverse is a collection of open source packages for the R programming language introduced by Hadley Wickham and his team that "share an underlying design philosophy, grammar, and data structures" of tidy data. Characteristic features of tidyverse packages include extensive use of non-standard evaluation and encouraging piping.
dplyr is an R package whose set of functions are designed to enable dataframe manipulation in an intuitive, user-friendly way. It is one of the core packages of the popular tidyverse set of packages in the R programming language. Data analysts typically use dplyr in order to transform existing datasets into a format better suited for some particular type of analysis, or data visualization.
R packages are extensions to the R statistical programming language. R packages contain code, data, and documentation in a standardised collection format that can be installed by users of R, typically via a centralised software repository such as CRAN. The large number of packages available for R, and the ease of installing and using them, has been cited as a major factor driving the widespread adoption of the language in data science.
Shiny is a web framework for developing web applications (apps), originally in R and since 2022 in python. It is free and open source. It was announced by Joe Cheng, CTO of Posit, formerly RStudio, in 2012. One of the uses of Shiny has been in fast prototyping.
The easystats collection of open source R packages was created in 2019 and primarily includes tools dedicated to the post-processing of statistical models. As of May 2022, the 10 packages composing the easystats ecosystem have been downloaded more than 8 million times, and have been used in more than 1000 scientific publications. The ecosystem is the topic of several statistical courses, video tutorials and books.