To those following this thRead: There was a thread on this topic a year or so ago on this list, in which contributors mentioned reasons that corporate powers-that-be were reluctant to commit to R as a corporate statistical platform. (My favorite was "There is no one to sue if something goes wrong.")
One reason that I do not think was discussed then, nor have I seen discussed since, is the issue of the continuity of support. If one person has contributed disproportionately heavily to the development and maintenance of a package, and then retires or follows other interests, and the package needs maintenance (perhaps as a consequence of new operating systems or a new version of R), is there any assurance that it will be available? With a commercial package such as, say, SPSS, the corporate memory and continuance makes such continued maintenance likely, but is there such a commitment with R packages? If my company came to depend heavily on a fairly obscure R package (as we are contemplating doing), what guarantee is there that it will be available next month/year/decade? I know of none, nor would I expect one. As R says when it starts up, "R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY." Ben Fairbank -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Patrick Burns Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 10:24 AM To: Albrecht,Dr. Stefan (AZ Private Equity Partner) Cc: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: Re: [R] R in Industry From what I know Matlab is much more popular in fixed income than R, but R is vastly more popular in equities. R seems to be making quite a lot of headway in finance, even in fixed income to some degree. At least to some extent, this is probably logical behavior -- fixed income is more mathematical, and equities is more statistical. Matlab is easier to learn mainly because it has much simpler data structures. However, once you are doing something where a complex data structure is natural, then R is going to be easier to use and you are likely to have a more complete implementation of what you want. If speed becomes a limiting factor, then moving the heavy computing to C is a natural thing to do, and very easy with R. Patrick Burns [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 (0)20 8525 0696 http://www.burns-stat.com (home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User") Albrecht, Dr. Stefan (AZ Private Equity Partner) wrote: >Dear all, > >I was reading with great interest your comments about the use of R in >the industry. Personally, I use R as scripting language in the financial >industry, not so much for its statistical capabilities (which are >great), but more for programming. I once switched from S-Plus to R, >because I liked R more, it had a better and easier to use documentation >and it is faster (especially with loops). > >Now some colleagues of mine are (finally) eager to join me in my >quantitative efforts, but they feel that they are more at ease with >Matlab. I can understand this. Matlab has a real IDE with symbolic >debugger, integrated editor and profiling, etc. The help files are >great, very comprehensive and coherent. It also could be easier to >learn. > >And, I was very astonished to realise, Matlab is very, very much faster >with simple "for" loops, which would speed up simulations considerably. >So I have trouble to argue for a use of R (which I like) instead of >Matlab. The price of Matlab is high, but certainly not prohibitive. R is >great and free, but maybe less comfortable to use than Matlab. > >Finally, after all, I have the impression that in many job offerings in >the financial industry R is much less often mentioned than Matlab. > >I would very much appreciate any comments on my above remarks. I know >there has been some discussions of R vs. Matlab on R-help, but these >could be somewhat out-dated, since both languages are evolving quite >quickly. > >With many thanks and best regards, >Stefan Albrecht > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > >______________________________________________ >R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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@stat.math.ethz.ch 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@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.
