HN user
It is too early to claim that Dario pushes job loss and other "doomer" narratives as a marketing strategy. IMO he has been relatively consistent up to this point in his statements. It'll be interesting to see if that changes after the recent actions by the government.
No worries, just wanted to mention it since you are both working on similar things and might find it interesting. Congratulations to both of you on your releases.
For doing "more with less" in graphics, I would rather learn a unique syntax for a package that is based on the grammar of graphics (ggplot2) than use a package with standard syntax and some other foundation.
I'm a recent first-time CRAN submitter. I believe my package went through 2 rounds of human review. I doubt R has a severe "too much AI slop" problem relative to other languages, but I can see how human reviewers would get inundated.
If you're interested, this isn't an alternative implementation of ggsql's syntax (I published this last year and it is based on a slightly modified layered grammar), but the SGL language is a similar take on the grammar of graphics + SQL idea: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14690. Currently implemented as an R package: https://sgl-projects.github.io/rsgl/index.html.
ggsql looks great for Posit's ecosystem (ggplot2 and plotnine). However, you can make the language more "SQL-like" by making some adjustments to the underlying grammar of graphics. I wrote a paper about a SQL-like language based on the grammar of graphics awhile back that discusses this, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14690. The language is called SGL. I sent an early version of the paper to Hadley (Posit) a couple of years ago - the language has enough similarities that I assume they were influenced by it and developed a version catered to their ecosystem. For SGL (not ggsql) in particular, there will be implementations available this year that aren't catered to Posit's ecosystem.