Speaker Doug Bates has been involved in the development of software for data science for over 50 years and has had the pleasure of being part of the R community since its inception. It wasn't always clear that open source projects like R would be as successful as they have been. He describes his view of the development path and how we have ended up with many high-quality tools for data science. A sometimes overlooked aspect of having many such tools is the desirability of using cross-platform data representations such as Arrow tables for exchange of structured data, which is also discussed. Slides available at dmbates.quarto.pub/