[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Radford Neal) writes:
> The truth: S-Plus is not particularly powerful, and it's not
> particularly well designed. Its implementation by the people at AT&T
> Bell labs is downright incompetent. Of course, it has lots of support
> for statistical methods, making it useful for statisticians to know,
> but it's a shame that this has had the effect of locking academic
> statisticians into this indifferently-designed and badly-implemented
> language, which is completely unusable some purposes, such as Markov
> chain Monte Carlo computations. The free "R" look-alike for S may fix
> at least the badly-implemented part of this dilema.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jan de Leeuw) writes:
> Hear, hear ! S-plus could have been a Microsoft product. It's
> bloated and slow and it's everywhere.
I don't want to start a statistical-computing religious war, but I'm
curious about alternative suggestions to S-Plus and R. Is there
another language that the anti-S-plus-crowd would recommend over
S-Plus for graphical data exploration (e.g., python, xlisp-stat, ibm's
data visualization tool, yorick). I've read the criticisms of S-plus,
but I don't see many alternative suggestions. Personnally, I use R,SAS
and occasionally Python for statistical analyses and data
exploration. For data management, I use a combination of SQL,SAS,UNIX
scripts, and Python. I find R and S-Plus to be VERY USEFUL for
graphical data exploration. But, I'm not married to one language over
another and would welcome alternative suggestions as I'm sure would
the student who posed the initial question.
Loren
-----------------------------
Loren McCarter
Graduate Student, Behavioral Neuroscience
UC Berkeley
===========================================================================
This list is open to everyone. Occasionally, less thoughtful
people send inappropriate messages. Please DO NOT COMPLAIN TO
THE POSTMASTER about these messages because the postmaster has no
way of controlling them, and excessive complaints will result in
termination of the list.
For information about this list, including information about the
problem of inappropriate messages and information about how to
unsubscribe, please see the web page at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
===========================================================================
