On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 09:24:38PM -0500, Charilaos Skiadas wrote: Hi Charilaos,
> I would particularly like to hear from people who were not "hard-core > programmers" before taking up R, so perhaps had originally some > difficulties with it. How hard was it, and how quickly did it start > paying off? Our main stumbling block I feel would be to get our > colleagues to switch to using R, at least for their teaching, and > most of them would probably have never really seen a programming > language before. I am an economics graduate student at Princeton. I have used R before coming here, but I noticed that many of my classmates started using R in graduate school. I think this happened because they observed a few of our professors (eg Christopher Sims) using R not only for statistics, but for more general programming tasks (solving dynamic programming problems, perturbation methods, etc). The main advantage of R for me is that besides having amazing libraries, it is a very nice general language to program in for any kind of numerical calculations. Once you program your own algorithms (eg in Bayesian statistics, solving functional equations, etc) the need for a general programming language becomes apparent. My impression is that R is very popular among Bayesians (see textbooks An Introduction to Modern Bayesian Econometrics by Tony Lancaster and Bayesian Data Analysis, Second Edition by Andrew Gelman, John B. Carlin, Hal S. Stern, and Donald B. Rubin, both use R), and is slowly gaining acceptance among finance people and macroeconomists (packages for former are showing up on CRAN). I never had professors discouraging me from R, except once when a professor warned me that anything except STATA will choke on huge cross-sectional datasets (but he turned out to be wrong, R works find with SQL databases for that purpose). I think that the best way to persuade your colleagues to switch to R is by example. Demonstrate that while other languages are OK if you are using standard canned methods, programming something new and innovative is best done in R, and it is a pain in many widely used languages (STATA comes to my mind, but I may not know it well enough). Don't push R, because if they try it and get frustrated, they might abandon it for good. Just make them curious enough so that they will try it because of the amazing things you can do in R. HTH, Tamas ______________________________________________ [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 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
