---
title: Best Wishes for Your Retirement, John!
date: '2021-04-27'
slug: john-retirement
---

A month ago, I heard from John Kimmel, our dear editor at Chapman & Hall, had
decided to retire soon. I was a little sad that he wouldn't be here for my
future books. The last time I met John was at rstudio::conf(2020) in SF. I asked
him of his age, but I don't remember the exact number now. It should be 70+
(perhaps 74), so the retirement is definitely well-deserved.

I was first introduced to John in 2012 by another author, and didn't think much
about him in the beginning. A few months later, I heard randomly a praise of
John from an attendee of the Chinese R Conference, who also happened to be an
editor. I don't remember her original words, but it was something like "John is
an editor who deeply cares about the interest of authors, and cares about it
even much more than the interest of publishers." I was intrigued, with awe.

In the following nine years, he helped me publish five books, and also
introduced a super supportive production team to me (e.g.,
[Becky](/en/2017/11/becky-proofread/)). The collaboration has always been
pleasant and smooth. I've met him at several conferences. Each time he was
carrying a notebook ([like Ian](/en/2018/01/ian-lyttle/)), taking notes of my
random thoughts.

If I were to name the No.1 hustle that I did with him over these years, I think
it would be [**bookdown**](/en/2018/08/bookdown-crc/), and more importantly, the
free and open books written with **bookdown**. I'm really glad that John managed
to convince Chapman & Hall of allowing the online versions of books to be free.
I also love the random emails from John telling me that they just had another
book written in **bookdown** ([for
example](https://twitter.com/JulianFaraway/status/1300838745801986048)).

I asked John if he'd like to write something about his splendid career. He
mentioned that someone else once asked him to list ten of his favorite books,
and he included the CART book (*Classification and Regression Trees* by Breiman
et. al) and [the S
book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language)), which were
published in 1984 (which happened to be the year when I was born). I wouldn't be
here without the S language (R's predecessor). I'd be extremely proud if
anything I've done today would still have an impact when one of today's newborns
grows up.

Thanks for your lifelong service to the statistics and R community, John! I wish
you will enjoy your new priorities. All the best!

P.S. Chapman & Hall has prepared a farewell card for John, and I'm sure everyone
will be amazed by John's career:
<https://www.groupgreeting.com/sign/d88275b20fb0b1d>
