I would stress the advantages of the free and open source nature of R over the proprietary programs you mention. Because R is free (as in beer), your student will have access to it even when they are free of the university that I presume buys a MATLAB/SPSS license for them. And because R is open source, when your student has an idea regarding how to make R work faster/more efficiently/more accurately, they can modify the source code at whatever level they like. They can also examine at whatever level they like what R is doing, so there are no black boxes involved.
On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, Matthew Dubins wrote: > Hi all, > > I've become quite enamored of R lately, and have decided to try to teach > some of its basics (reading in data, manipulation and classical stats > analyses) to my fellow grad students at the University of Toronto. I > sent out a mass email and have already received some positive > responses. One student, however, wanted to know what differentiates the > routines that R uses, from those that MATLAB and SPSS use. In other > words, in what respects do R routines work faster/more efficiently/more > accurately than those of MATLAB/SPSS. > > I thank you in advance for any answer you can give me (or rather, the > inquiring student). > > Cheers, > Matthew Dubins > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.