[perturbation]

One thing I've been curious about with R:

Why is it that popular libraries in R are replaced with other names when enhanced? I.e., plyr->dplyr, reshape->reshape2, etc.? Is it a namespacing thing? I guess if there's not a universally accepted way of versioning library imports that would explain it as well.

[hyperbovine]

"dplyr is the next iteration of plyr, focussed on tools for working with data frames (hence the d in the name)."

[baldfat]

plyr does more than dplyr (I perfer dplyr)

reshape does more than reshape2 which does more than tidyr

They actually get more refined and are different creatures with similar features and not different versions.