I apologize for joining this discussion late, but I was out of town and just reviewed postings to R-help. I noticed that there were a couple of other threads that also touched on similar issues.
Bob Andersen and I have written a paper on using R to teach social statistics; a copy is at <http://socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Teaching-with-R.pdf>. It would be tedious to rehash the paper in detail here, but I'll make a few brief points: (1) I believe that, except in special circumstances, GUIs to statistical software are best for casual or infrequent use. Even users of SPSS who intend to use the software seriously would be well advised to learn to write commands. (2) The GUI in the Rcmdr package covers what's typically taught in first and second social-statistics classes. (3) The difficulty of moving from one statistical package (or computing environment) to another shouldn't be confused with learning to use a particular package (or environment) as a novice. I don't believe that it's any more difficult to write R commands than, say, SAS or SPSS commands. (4) As others have pointed out, the principal advantage of R (or another statistical computing environment, as opposed to a statistical package) is its programmability. Nevertheless, R is not difficult to teach and learn even to those who will not (initially) be writing programs. John -------------------------------- John Fox Department of Sociology McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario Canada L8S 4M4 905-525-9140x23604 http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
