You'd think that someone choosing a name for a new technology product would do a single google search first, yet time and time again we end up with these collisions. There should be a central repository mapping names to services that we can use to look up potential names.

Yup, my first thought too. Though presumably different roots - player and pliers. There's also another stringr (crowdsourced video content platform) and caret (text editing for Chrome).

Now dplyr has pretty much replaced it with better syntax and perf. Take a look at it. https://github.com/hadley/dplyr

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.

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

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.

I'll admit, I did little research other than looking for media players using the same name. There's only so many relevant words or variations of words I could use.