I feel compelled to rebuff Barry's
attack on the word "Task Views".
I think it is a fine description (I
was not involved in originating it),
though of course I'd be open to better
suggestions.
"Look at all these things you can do with R"
is also nice but lacks a certain amount
of brevity.
Pat
On 12/02/2012 10:43, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Patrick Burns<pbu...@pburns.seanet.com> wrote:
Now it could be that people are not trying
very hard to solve their own problems, but
to be fair it is a pretty gruelling process
to find the Task Views.
May I suggest that there be a "Task Views" item
on the left sidebar of the R website in the
Documentation section?
I'd go further, and suggest that the list of Task Views appears on
the home page of www.r-project.org under the heading "Look at all
these things you can do with R". (Maybe to replace the 8 year old
clustering graphic (or maybe someone could do something in ggplot2
that looks nice n shiny?) )
"Task Views" (stupid name, who's idea was that?) are an absolute GEM
and shouldn't be slotted between 'What's New?' and "Search" on CRAN
mirror sites. The CRAN Task Views page doesn't even say what "Task
Views" are. Here's some text that might help:
"Task Views are short documents outlining the functionality of R in a
given field or methodology. Since most of R's power comes from add-on
packages downloaded from CRAN, Task Views tend to concentrate on
summarising the packages that are relevant. If you ever find yourself
thinking 'how do I do X in R?' then the list of Task Views should be
your first stop."
Barry
--
Patrick Burns
pbu...@pburns.seanet.com
twitter: @portfolioprobe
http://www.portfolioprobe.com/blog
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of 'Some hints for the R beginner'
and 'The R Inferno')
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