On Wed, 1 Dec 2004 16:46:07 -0000, "Robert Brown FM CEFAS" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote :
> In the end my experience of r help is that you get what you pay for. I think this statement is very true, but not necessarily in the way you meant it. R and R-help are "free" in the open source sense, and "free" in that you don't need to pay money to someone to use them, but they aren't "free" in the sense of requiring no effort to use. If you don't devote effort to understanding R and to framing questions that get good responses in R-help, then you won't get nearly as much value out of them as if you did. My own experience is that effort is required with commercial software too, but I've never really taken advantage of support contracts, so maybe they really do make things effortlessly easy. >Many of the so called socratic responses (in this list and the wider academic >community) can be seen as simply way to avoid additional work of a complete >reply. That's definitely part of it. If a short reference to an FAQ answers a question, or an RTFM message encourages someone to RTFM, then that's a good thing. I get "complete replies" when I call the support desk of my ISP, and they are almost always completely useless. I'd rather get a short response from someone knowledgeable than a long one from someone reading a script. >Experienced R users don't seem to understand how difficult the program can be >to new users. I don't think it's valid to generalize like that. Some do, some don't. > Responding that the questioner should read the 'Introduction to R' or a > similar >document is like answering a question for directions to one's house with 'Buy >a map'. I think it's more like answering a question about which bus to take downtown with directions on how to get a free bus route map. >Most likely both such questioners have already tried that and are asking >because that approach failed. I doubt if that's true. I think most such questioners are just used to being customers, being served by someone. R has no customers. It has a community of users and developers who help each other. One part of the help is to tell beginners where the resources are that they should learn from. Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ [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
