Thanks for your note Uwe. Yes I think a lot of the needed work was related to implementing R functions that many of us use that are not available in S-Plus, plus what to do about plotmath. It wasn't enough to just be able to load the R package. I don't think implementation of the needed R functions in S-Plus ever happened.
Frank Uwe Ligges-3 wrote > > On 12.01.2012 17:38, Frank Harrell wrote: >> As a slight aside, Tibco/Spotfire originally planned to provide a >> capability >> to load R packages into S-Plus. This always seemed to me to be a hard >> thing >> to do, and if my understanding is correct, this proved to be too >> difficult >> to do in S-Plus, at least for large packages such as mine. > > Frank, > > this dates back to the times of Insightful. They already did that and > had a module that allowed to load R packages. Of course, they had to be > S-PLUS compatible (which is not really easy any more if package authors > made use of R functionality that exceed the features of S-PLUS). They > even had hired people to make some R packages S-PLUS compatible, > R2WinBUGS was just one example that was available from their "CSAN" > repositories. (Nowadays R2WInBUGS is no longer S-PLUS compatible, since > the authors do not care too much and do not have S-PLUS licenses to > check it.) > > Best, > Uwe > > > > > > > >> Frank >> >> Terry Therneau-2 wrote >>> >>> John, >>> Spotfire is a menu driven data exploration tool, very popular here >>> with biologists who found that their previous Excel based approach >>> doesn't cut it for large data sets. When TIBCO wanted to expand the >>> tool with further quantitative features they made (I think) a bright >>> decision to purchase S-plus and integrate it as a back end, rather than >>> try to write dozens of new modules in house. The "Splus vs R" aspect of >>> the list responses misses the main point, however. >>> >>> Spotfire is designed to let you nose around in a data set, quickly >>> plotting various aspects, zoom in on subsets (imagine a mouse based >>> version of the "pinch" metafor used on the iphone), etc. It is a useful >>> and very well designed tool; one demo was enough to make the sale and >>> early growth here was explosive. But if you already know R you can do >>> those graphs already, albeit quite a bit slower. I decided not to >>> persue proficiency in Spotfire, but that was partly because it's Windows >>> based and I prefer Unix. Also most of my work is at the >>> post-exploration phase, and I would have flipped back to straight R for >>> that anyway. >>> >>> Terry Therneau >>> >>> ______________________________________________ >>> R-help@ 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. >>> >> >> >> ----- >> Frank Harrell >> Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University >> -- >> View this message in context: >> http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/general-question-on-Spotfire-tp4285758p4289575.html >> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-help@ 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@ 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. > ----- Frank Harrell Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/general-question-on-Spotfire-tp4285758p4297916.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ 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.