Retire the documentation for R, MATLAB, Julia, and F#

Plotly R, MATLAB, Julia, Net
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Plotly’s visualization libraries are downloaded more than 22 million times a month, for over 764 million all-time downloads. Every day, charts created with plotly.js, plotly.py, and Dash help millions of people worldwide understand and interact with their data.

However, the plotly.js charting library alone consists of 138,000 lines of JavaScript, with another 133,000 lines of tests and over 700 open issues. We are, in short, typical of a successful, mature open source project, and face the same fundamental challenge as our peers: lots of work and not enough hands to do it.

The usual response to this is, “Get the community to contribute.” While we encourage that (and do our best to prioritize review of community contributions), our code base is quite complex, which means it can take quite a while to figure out where and how to make a change without breaking something else. We are therefore trying to focus on cleaning up what we have rather than adding new features, in the hope of making it easier for other people to fix and add what they care about most.

As part of this, we have decided to take two steps. The first is to retire the documentation for R, MATLAB, Julia, and F#, which will give our team the time to focus on continuing to actively develop and maintain the JavaScript and Python documentation. We haven’t maintained these languages or their documentation for several years, and rather than keeping out-of-date material online to confuse both people and LLMs, we will take it down at the beginning of November 2025. All of the sources will remain in those languages’ repositories on GitHub for reference, and will always be under an open license so that community members can look at it and/or look after it.

Concurrently, we would like to try an experiment. If you are doing graduate work in computer graphics and data visualization, are in your final year of an undergraduate program and looking for a course-length capstone project, or you are between jobs and want a chance to hone your JavaScript skills, we’d like to talk to you. In exchange for six to eight hours a week, for ten to twelve weeks, we can offer you challenging problems, mentoring, and the chance to help literally millions of people worldwide. If this sounds interesting, please reach out to community@plot.ly.

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Thanks for maintaining the documentations. The F# library was sponsored by the Plotly firm for a while and the library has been maintained on Plotly.net to the latest version. There maybe a path to refer the documentation to Plotly.net so that newcomers can find the latest docs.

There has been a long-standing issue on GitHub about this discussion.

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I am extremely disappointed to see this update as a minor contributor and daily user of the plotly R package for over 8 years. How does this affect the the R Figure Reference documentation? Will this site continue to be updated as described since it is machine-generated?

“The pages linked in the sidebar together form the exhaustive reference for all of the attributes in the core figure data structure that the plotly library operates on. They are automatically-generated from the machine-readable Plotly.js schema reference.”

Have there been any discussions with third parties to host and continue maintaining documentation for R?

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Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to maintain the documentation properly for several years, and would rather be honest about that than continuing to host something that has fallen out of date so much that it will confuse both human and AI coders. All of the content will be archived, and if volunteers want to take over maintenance and hosting, please reach out. Thanks - Greg Wilson (manager of the Libraries team at Plotly)

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Thanks for the quick response Greg. I have opened Issue #2456 on the R Plotly Github repo for community discussion among fellow R plotly lovers.

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Follow-up question - shouldn’t this be in the “Plotly R, Matlab, Julia, Net” category instead of “Dash Python”?

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Thank you for the suggestion. We share it first in the Plotly Dash category because it has a much bigger following (in case Plotly people are following that tag instead of the R, Matlab, Jullia tag). But I just switched it over since it’s been well over two weeks.
Thank you again.

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Hi msummersgill, long time maintainer of the R package here.

Posit (my employer) will be funding a contractor to help me migrate the plotly docs to a new location. We’ll also be coordinating with Plotly so that plotly.com/r will continue to be available until that work is done – only then will plotly.com/r point you to a new location.

Please follow this thread for progress updates on that work

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