On Fri, 5 Sep 2003, Brian D. Ripley wrote: > In general I find such discussions irrelvant. > I bet those users make far, far more errors then any > of these packages do so.
However, without having the discussions with my colleagues, nothing will ever change. The perception of SAS' "bestness" flows, in my experience from several things: a. It was developed long before Splus and R so more people are familiar with it, especially managers and other decision-makers. b. The FDA requires SAS transport version 5 datasets, and it is somewhat easier to use SAS throughout a clinical trial than to perform analyses in one package and convert data to another at the end. c. Because SAS costs so much $$, it _must_ be good (dumb, but people do think that) d. Because SAS is commercial software, a posteriori errors found in clinical trials analyses (and due to software issues) can be attributed by the NDA applicants to the SAS Institute. Lawyers really like this. Of course, Splus is also commercial and therefore does not suffer from criticism on these grounds. It is a fact of life that building a better mousetrap does not guarantee that the "world will beat a path to your door". Marketing and perception are very important! Part of my job involves defending choice of software, and since I'm swimming upstream by choosing to learn R, I need to have intelligent arguments to use when this choice is questioned. Given the responses to my original post, I now do have those arguments in hand. This merely confirms what is already obvious: this is an amazing listserv! Respectfully, david paul ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
