There are a lot of R packages, which is why before I implement any chart type myself, I look to see if someone already did it. Recently, the official R package repository surpassed the 10,000 mark.

Why so many packages? R has a very active developer community, who contribute new packages to CRAN on a daily basis. As a result, R is unparalleled in its capabilities for statistical computing, data science, and data visualization: almost anything you might care to do with data has likely already been implemented for you and released as an R package.

That’s quite the feat for a language only statisticians knew about not that long ago.