Re: [R] R in the NY Times
on 01/10/2009 01:50 PM Kingsford Jones wrote: The reactions to the NYT article have certainly made for some interesting reading. Here are some of the links: http://overdetermined.net/site/content/new-york-times-article-r http://jackman.stanford.edu/blog/?p=1053 http://ggorjan.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-york-times-on-r.html several posts on Andrew Gelman's blog: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7nwgq/the_new_york_times_notices_the_r_programming/ comments here: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/r-you-ready-for-r/ It's too bad that SAS has reacted to the negative reactions to their NYT quote with more FUD. The quote that Tony posted is just a thinly-veiled jab at R (veiled by a disingenuous we value open source veneer). Perhaps SAS is shooting themselves in the foot with their reactions; aren't they making it harder if they should ever decide the best thing to do is to embrace R and the philosophies behind it? Four years ago, Marc Schwartz posted interesting comments realted to this: http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/04/12/9497.html Thanks for pointing this out Kingsford. The books referenced there are excellent for providing an understanding of the dynamics that have been the subject of many of these threads here since the NYT article was published. There is a natural tension between leading edge adopters, the main stream and the laggards. Moore's Crossing the Chasm provides good insights into this tension and the acceptance of new products and technology. Grove's Only the Paranoid Survive shows how individual companies and even entire industries (think banking and autos today) can suddenly face an unexpected risk to their survival when they fail to comprehend marketplace dynamics and take appropriate action. Microsoft's mis-steps vis-a-vis Vista opened the door for Apple and Linux to increase their respective marketshare and for open source more generally (eg. Firefox). BTW, readers might find this commentary of interest: Commentary: Create a tech-friendly U.S. government By Jimmy Wales and Andrea Weckerle http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/01/07/wales.obama.cto/index.html On another note, I wonder why in the various conversations there seems to be pervasive views that a) the FDA won't accept work done in R, and b) SAS is the only way to effectively handle data? I strongly believe that the comments regarding R and the FDA are overly negative and pessimistic. The hurdles to the use of R for clinical trials are shrinking. There has been substantive activity over the past several years, both internally at the FDA and within the R community to increase R's acceptance in this domain. At the Joint Statistical Meetings in 2006, Sue Bell from the FDA spoke during a session with a presentation entitled Times 'R' A Changing: FDA Perspectives on Use of Open Source. A copy of this presentation is available here: http://www.fda.gov/cder/Offices/Biostatistics/Bell.pdf In 2007, during an FDA committee meeting reviewing the safety profile of Avandia (Rosiglitazone), the internal FDA meta-analysis performed by Joy Mele, the FDA statistician, was done using R. A copy of this presentation is available here: http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/07/slides/2007-4308s1-05-fda-mele.ppt Given the high profile nature of drug safety issues today, that R was used for this analysis by the FDA itself speaks volumes. Also in 2007, at the annual R user meeting at Iowa State University, I had the pleasure and privilege of Chairing a session on the use of R for clinical trials. The speakers included Frank Harrell (well known to R users here), Tony Rossini and David James (Novartis Pharmaceuticals) and Mat Soukup (FDA statistician). Copies of our presentations are available here, a little more than half way down the page: http://user2007.org/program/ At that meeting, we also introduced a document that has been updated since then and approved formally by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The document provides guidance for the use of R in the regulated clinical trials domain, addresses R's compliance with the relevant regulations (eg. 21 CFR 11) as well as describing the development, testing and quality processes in place for R, also known as the Software Development Life Cycle. That document is available here: http://www.r-project.org/doc/R-FDA.pdf I have heard directly from colleagues in industry that this document has provided significant value in their internal discussions regarding implementing the use of R within their respective environments and assuaging many fears regarding R's use. Additionally, presentations regarding the use of open source software and R specifically for clinical trials have been made at DIA and other industry meetings. This fall, there is a session on the use of R scheduled for the FDA's Industry Statistics Workshop in Washington, D.C. For those unfamiliar, I would also
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
“We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.” The lady who made this comment, Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS, has written a response to try and clarify what she meant (funilly enough, i got this link from a SAS mate of mine who is now going to have a look into R for the first time): http://blogs.sas.com/sascom/index.php?/archives/434-This-post-is-rated-R.html [quote] As for open source and my airplane quote … My remark reflects a key difference between R and SAS, that of support, reliability, and validation. Customers value SAS for many things, including our extensive testing, documentation, 24/7 support, and training. In contrast, the quality of proliferating R packages is varied and uneven, especially in complex analytical modules. Mistakes in these packages can lead to misleading results, even for experienced users. The airplane comment was meant to point out this key difference. Not to condemn open source. In fact, SAS values open-source software. Our software runs on Linux. We use some open-source tools in development. And we plan to embrace open source further in the future. The world has many complex problems. We advocate approaches based on science, on analysis to address these problems. Making more analytic methods readily available is a good thing. From SAS; from R; from the resourceful individuals who innovate with their tools of choice, regardless of the source. [end quote] On 7 Jan, 14:50, Marc Schwartz marc_schwa...@comcast.net wrote: on 01/07/2009 08:44 AM Kevin E. Thorpe wrote: Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07pro... January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power By ASHLEE VANCE SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.” Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? Kevin It is an ignorant comment by a marketing person who has been spoon fed her lines...it is also a comment being made from a very defensive and insecure posture. Congrats to R Core and the R Community. This is yet another sign of R's growth and maturity. Regards, Marc Schwartz __ r-h...@r-project.org mailing listhttps://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guidehttp://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 8:11 AM, Tony Breyal tony.bre...@googlemail.com wrote: We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet. The lady who made this comment, Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS, has written a response to try and clarify what she meant (funilly enough, i got this link from a SAS mate of mine who is now going to have a look into R for the first time): http://blogs.sas.com/sascom/index.php?/archives/434-This-post-is-rated-R.html [quote] As for open source and my airplane quote … My remark reflects a key difference between R and SAS, that of support, reliability, and validation. Customers value SAS for many things, including our extensive testing, documentation, 24/7 support, and training. In contrast, the quality of proliferating R packages is varied and uneven, especially in complex analytical modules. Mistakes in these packages can lead to misleading results, even for experienced users. The airplane comment was meant to point out this key difference. Not to condemn open source. In fact, SAS values open-source software. Our software runs on Linux. We use some open-source tools in development. And we plan to embrace open source further in the future. The world has many complex problems. We advocate approaches based on science, on analysis to address these problems. Making more analytic methods readily available is a good thing. From SAS; from R; from the resourceful individuals who innovate with their tools of choice, regardless of the source. [end quote] Ms. Milley mischaracterizes her remark about the relative unreliability of freeware as if she had employed the termopen source. David A. Wheeler's Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)? Look at the Numbers! provides quantitative measures for evaluating open source software, including market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. With respect to the reliability of open source software, Wheeler writes, There are a lot of anecdotal stories that OSS/FS is more reliable, but finally there is quantitative data confirming that mature OSS/FS programs are often more reliable [than equivalent proprietary software programs]. Wheeler lists among his sources the Fuzz Report http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~bart/fuzz/fuzz.html . __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
2009/1/10 Tony Breyal tony.bre...@googlemail.com: [SAS marketroid quote] In fact, SAS values open-source software. But clearly not enough to open-source SAS itself. It would seem that SAS values _other_people's_ open source. If SAS was open source and free, then SAS would collect on all the other things Customers value SAS for - support, testing, training, docs, etc etc. And there would be a lot more people using it. Another quote: We advocate approaches based on science - closed source is closed knowledge and is nearer alchemy than science. I may use proprietary software for video editing or music production, but when it comes to science, it's got to be open. Barru __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
more on the reasons R is bad for you http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/01/top-ten-rrreasons-r-is-bad-for-you/ On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 12:01 AM, Barry Rowlingson b.rowling...@lancaster.ac.uk wrote: 2009/1/10 Tony Breyal tony.bre...@googlemail.com: [SAS marketroid quote] In fact, SAS values open-source software. But clearly not enough to open-source SAS itself. It would seem that SAS values _other_people's_ open source. If SAS was open source and free, then SAS would collect on all the other things Customers value SAS for - support, testing, training, docs, etc etc. And there would be a lot more people using it. Another quote: We advocate approaches based on science - closed source is closed knowledge and is nearer alchemy than science. I may use proprietary software for video editing or music production, but when it comes to science, it's got to be open. Barru __ R-help@r-project.org 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. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
I think the substance of the issue is that the more eyes on code, the fewer the bugs (assuming a well-designed examination and debugging process is in place, as is typical for large open source projects like R). By this (obvious?)criterion, both the remarks about the dangers of proprietary code and the greater unreliability of R's lesser-used specialty packages, which by their nature tend to be less carefully perused, are valid. Perhaps an argument is that certain code might not get written at all if it were not proprietary. Device drivers might be an example. But possibly other than that, it does seem like SAS needs to reconsider their marketing strategy and advertising claims. Anecdotal remark: I orginally moved from S-Plus to R because R provided **better** documentation, support, and had fewer bugs, which were more rapidly fixed when found. One of my smarter investment choices. Cheers to all, Bert Gunter -Original Message- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Barry Rowlingson Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 10:32 AM To: Tony Breyal Cc: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times 2009/1/10 Tony Breyal tony.bre...@googlemail.com: [SAS marketroid quote] In fact, SAS values open-source software. But clearly not enough to open-source SAS itself. It would seem that SAS values _other_people's_ open source. If SAS was open source and free, then SAS would collect on all the other things Customers value SAS for - support, testing, training, docs, etc etc. And there would be a lot more people using it. Another quote: We advocate approaches based on science - closed source is closed knowledge and is nearer alchemy than science. I may use proprietary software for video editing or music production, but when it comes to science, it's got to be open. Barru __ R-help@r-project.org 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@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
The reactions to the NYT article have certainly made for some interesting reading. Here are some of the links: http://overdetermined.net/site/content/new-york-times-article-r http://jackman.stanford.edu/blog/?p=1053 http://ggorjan.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-york-times-on-r.html several posts on Andrew Gelman's blog: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7nwgq/the_new_york_times_notices_the_r_programming/ comments here: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/r-you-ready-for-r/ It's too bad that SAS has reacted to the negative reactions to their NYT quote with more FUD. The quote that Tony posted is just a thinly-veiled jab at R (veiled by a disingenuous we value open source veneer). Perhaps SAS is shooting themselves in the foot with their reactions; aren't they making it harder if they should ever decide the best thing to do is to embrace R and the philosophies behind it? Four years ago, Marc Schwartz posted interesting comments realted to this: http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/04/12/9497.html On another note, I wonder why in the various conversations there seems to be pervasive views that a) the FDA won't accept work done in R, and b) SAS is the only way to effectively handle data? best, Kingsford Jones On 7 Jan, 14:50, Marc Schwartz marc_schwa...@comcast.net wrote: on 01/07/2009 08:44 AM Kevin E. Thorpe wrote: Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07pro... January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power By ASHLEE VANCE SAS says it has noticed R's rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet. Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? Kevin It is an ignorant comment by a marketing person who has been spoon fed her lines...it is also a comment being made from a very defensive and insecure posture. Congrats to R Core and the R Community. This is yet another sign of R's growth and maturity. Regards, Marc Schwartz __ r-h...@r-project.org mailing listhttps://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guidehttp://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. __ R-help@r-project.org 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@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Bert Gunter gunter.ber...@gene.com [Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 08:31:03PM CET]: [...] Perhaps an argument is that certain code might not get written at all if it were not proprietary. Device drivers might be an example. Device drivers are not an example. Linux is ubiquitous _despite_ device manufacturers being secretive about their protocols and interfaces. There's a whole lot of people out there who seem to take pride, if not joy, in reengineering. At the moment I am profiting immensely from the gpsbabel tool, which translates readily between all different GPS-related formats, closed or documented. -- Johannes Hüsing There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture mailto:johan...@huesing.name from such a trifling investment of fact. http://derwisch.wikidot.com (Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi) __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
There do exist device manufacturers who GPL their device drivers, e.g. http://freshmeat.net/projects/wanpipe/?branch_id=73783release_id=290741 On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Bert Gunter gunter.ber...@gene.com wrote: I think the substance of the issue is that the more eyes on code, the fewer the bugs (assuming a well-designed examination and debugging process is in place, as is typical for large open source projects like R). By this (obvious?)criterion, both the remarks about the dangers of proprietary code and the greater unreliability of R's lesser-used specialty packages, which by their nature tend to be less carefully perused, are valid. Perhaps an argument is that certain code might not get written at all if it were not proprietary. Device drivers might be an example. But possibly other than that, it does seem like SAS needs to reconsider their marketing strategy and advertising claims. Anecdotal remark: I orginally moved from S-Plus to R because R provided **better** documentation, support, and had fewer bugs, which were more rapidly fixed when found. One of my smarter investment choices. Cheers to all, Bert Gunter -Original Message- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Barry Rowlingson Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 10:32 AM To: Tony Breyal Cc: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times 2009/1/10 Tony Breyal tony.bre...@googlemail.com: [SAS marketroid quote] In fact, SAS values open-source software. But clearly not enough to open-source SAS itself. It would seem that SAS values _other_people's_ open source. If SAS was open source and free, then SAS would collect on all the other things Customers value SAS for - support, testing, training, docs, etc etc. And there would be a lot more people using it. Another quote: We advocate approaches based on science - closed source is closed knowledge and is nearer alchemy than science. I may use proprietary software for video editing or music production, but when it comes to science, it's got to be open. Barru __ R-help@r-project.org 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@r-project.org 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@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
on 01/07/2009 09:47 PM Gabor Grothendieck wrote: On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 10:26 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel e...@debian.org wrote: On 7 January 2009 at 18:24, Gabor Grothendieck wrote: | By running the code below we see that the: | - sum of the three seems to be rising at a constant rate | - S is declining | - SAS and R are rising | - R is rising the fastest through its completed its phase | of highest growth which ended around 2004 I wonder whether we need to account for traffic on all the additional r-sig-* mailing lists ? Of the handful that I follow, some seem to have taken traffic from r-help. This could account for (at least parts of) the apparent traffic growth slowdown since 2004 as many of these added lists appeared only in the last few years. Good observation. It would be interesting to combine the data from all the lists to see what the effect is. Agreed. You can use the basic framework of the R-Help code that I posted yesterday to do that. The key gotcha is that some of the list archives have the posts stored on a per calendar quarter basis, not monthly. At least one has a mix. This seems to be somewhat dependent upon list volume, though that is not a consistent factor. Thus, you would have to review each archive individually and adjust the archive URL's in the code accordingly. You would also see the impact on the subsequent aggregation of the data, since the monthly time series based analyses (as opposed to yearly) will have to be adjusted, given the differing granularity of the data. HTH, Marc __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
More commentary on Slashdot: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/07/2316227 __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
The open-source mentality is invaluable, as most on this list know. That is what keeps the R evolution progressing at a pace that SAS cannot keep up with. On a side note (a very side note), I am a zealot for an exercise program called Crossfit. Crossfit has adopted the same open-source mentality as found in the Linux model and has grown into the most valuable fitness and strength training program on the planet. There is an online journal (called crossfit journal) http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/CrossFitJournal-Budding_Retrospecti ve.pdf that lists the three components of the linux open-source model: The Linux development model: * Release early and often * Delegate everything you can * Be open to the point of promiscuity Crossfit then followed with its own open-source principles: The CrossFit development model: * Release early and often - Daily! * Delegate everything you can - Meet the experts from the realms of climbing, lifting, swimming, gymnastics, fighting, you name it. * Be open to the point of promiscuity - Read the WOD weblog comments. - Check out the discussion board. - See photos of athletes puking! The point being, it is not the program itself that is amazing, but the people that have made serious contributions to it that make it so. In the same vein, R is only a representation of the many, many valuable talented people who are constantly adding to its functionality because of its open-source nature. That is, R itself is good, useful etc. But, it is the people that add to it and help it grow as a scientific tool that keep it as the lingua franca. -Original Message- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Max Kuhn Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 10:17 AM To: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times More commentary on Slashdot: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/07/2316227 __ R-help@r-project.org 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@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On 1/7/09, Gabor Grothendieck ggrothendi...@gmail.com wrote: Here is the same number of messages/posts data for each of S, SAS, R: - reworked into a 3 column ts class time series - with Jan 2009 removed since its not complete - leading and trailing NA rows removed My software of choice is Stata, so here are compatible data from statalist (using http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/lwgate/STATALIST/archives/): ## Statalist traffic stata - structure(c( 654,574,781, 848, 714, 823,1063,1057, 701,625,909, 799, 941,1052,1013,1269, 868,690,937,1155,1040,1113,1125,1252, 640,649,899, 898,1013,1161, 991,1325, 622,697,726,1102, 818,1077,,1374, 684,548,651, 876, 964, 963,1125,1078, 717,588,943, 923, 885, 892, 986,1200, 728,575,605, 901,1010,1011,1224,1396, 627,605,712, 807,1098, 951, 939,1446, 844,790,970, 940,1001,1283,1231,1509, 776,644,870, 928,1094, 928, 999,1340, 603,512,670, 824, 794, 951, 739,1056 ), .Dim = c(8L, 12L), .Dimnames = list(c(2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008), c(Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec))) The list existed from 1994 or 1996 or so, but the data are only available from 2001. You'd probably be surprised to find out that based on the list summaries, the size of Stata world is about half of SAS on the counts plot; and on the log scale, it shows linear (which means, exponential) growth throughout the range, while both SAS and R have been slowing down in the last couple of years (with an explanation already offered regarding the r-sig-* lists). Of course overall that's an incorrect comparison, to begin with. The support systems for all three packages are different: most (US) universities will have dedicated and well-certified SAS gurus answering most semicolon questions locally, while r-help would be the first thing on my mind if I cannot get what I need in the docs. I would thus expect traffic on r-help will to be heavier relative to the user base. Another measure of interest might be the number of contributed packages. The phrase for R is this: Currently, the CRAN package repository features 1633 objects including 1625 packages and 8 bundles containing 34 packages, for a total of 1659 available packages. The phrase for Stata is this: Statistical Software Components, Boston College Department of Economics: There are currently 1275 items in this series, of which 1274 are downloadable (http://logec.repec.org/scripts/seriesstat.pl?item=repec:boc:bocode). So programming activity in Stata is about 3/4 of that in R at their face values (you would probably need to downplay both numbers for obsolete packages, though). Whether SAS has a unified repository of user contributed modules with direct counts available, I have no clue. A really good measure for R will be the total # of the downloads of r-base for all platforms from all CRAN mirrors (and I would expect that # can be found from the servers' logs). Given that it is so easy to download everything nice and clean and up to date, I would doubt anybody will be distributing CD-ROMs with R install files among friends and colleagues. SAS (and Stata, and SPSS, and Minitab, and...) should have their (internal) number of licenses sold (and yes those come on the disks initially), but those are badly blurred by the network licenses, and are commercial secrets, anyway. -- Stas Kolenikov, also found at http://stas.kolenikov.name Small print: I use this email account for mailing lists only. __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
As the product manager for S+, I'd like to comment as well. I think the burgeoning interest in R demonstrates that there's demand for analytics to solve real, business-critical problems in a broad spectrum of companies and roles, and that some of the incumbent analytics offerings, in particular SAS and SPSS, don't sufficiently meet the growing need for analytics in many major companies. S+ (now TIBCO Spotfire S+) is of course a commercial software package based on the S language, which was a forerunner of R as mentioned in the article, and has been widely adopted. It is currently used in a wide variety of areas, including Life Sciences, Financial Services, and Utilities, for applications such as speeding the analysis of clinical trial data, optimizing portfolios, and assessing potential sites for building wind farms. I welcome, respect, and appreciate the vitality, creativity, and sheer productivity of the R community, and the high quality of statistical methods the community creates. And, because of the close historical ties between the two products, it is generally easy to port most R statistics into the commercial S+ environment, and we have worked to make that easier in recent releases. Once in S+, these analytic methods can be incorporated into intuitive tools for business decision makers and deployed to automated environments, using visual workflows, web-based applications (using standard web services), Spotfire Guided Applications for dynamic visual analysis, and scalable, event-driven architectures using TIBCO's IT infrastructure. S+ also provides some unique offerings, such as the ability to flexibly and efficiently analyze very large data sets. In this way, I feel companies can maximize the value of their analytic investments to make rapid business decisions, whether those analytics are developed in R or S+. Regards, Lou Bajuk-Yorgan Sr. Director, Product Management TIBCO Spotfire Division lba...@tibco.com -Original Message- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Douglas Bates Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 12:58 PM To: marc_schwa...@comcast.net Cc: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Marc Schwartz marc_schwa...@comcast.net wrote: on 01/07/2009 08:44 AM Kevin E. Thorpe wrote: Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07pr ogram.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power By ASHLEE VANCE SAS says it has noticed R's rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet. Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? Kevin It is an ignorant comment by a marketing person who has been spoon fed her lines...it is also a comment being made from a very defensive and insecure posture. __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 10:42 -0600, Stas Kolenikov wrote: A really good measure for R will be the total # of the downloads of r-base for all platforms from all CRAN mirrors (and I would expect that # can be found from the servers' logs). Hello, You obviate here that many of us are downloading R from our Linux distribution repositories directly. Besides, given the free nature of R, some of us install it in several computers, even, in my case, briefly in somebody else's computer for a short time if I have an urgent task to solve. Of course, I would never do (or be able to do) this with SAS... So, the number of downloads from CRAN servers seems like a lousy proxy for the total number of users of SAS. Best regards, Carlos J. Gil Bellosta http://www.datanalytics.com __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Yes I think R as a package can really learn from SAS and SPSS in making GUI more user friendly , even at the risk of dumbing down some complexity.. also as a consultant I know that selling software requires a lot of marketing follow ups..which is why R has lagged behind in actual implementation and marketing ( who will go on site at a client and implement)...despite being more robust and of course helping companies save costs in these critical times. If you market R more and even get a 10 % share of the commercial market, imagine how many jobs you save by cutting down software costs of the employers.. Ajay www.decisionstats.com On 1/8/09, Louis Bajuk-Yorgan lba...@tibco.com wrote: As the product manager for S+, I'd like to comment as well. I think the burgeoning interest in R demonstrates that there's demand for analytics to solve real, business-critical problems in a broad spectrum of companies and roles, and that some of the incumbent analytics offerings, in particular SAS and SPSS, don't sufficiently meet the growing need for analytics in many major companies. S+ (now TIBCO Spotfire S+) is of course a commercial software package based on the S language, which was a forerunner of R as mentioned in the article, and has been widely adopted. It is currently used in a wide variety of areas, including Life Sciences, Financial Services, and Utilities, for applications such as speeding the analysis of clinical trial data, optimizing portfolios, and assessing potential sites for building wind farms. I welcome, respect, and appreciate the vitality, creativity, and sheer productivity of the R community, and the high quality of statistical methods the community creates. And, because of the close historical ties between the two products, it is generally easy to port most R statistics into the commercial S+ environment, and we have worked to make that easier in recent releases. Once in S+, these analytic methods can be incorporated into intuitive tools for business decision makers and deployed to automated environments, using visual workflows, web-based applications (using standard web services), Spotfire Guided Applications for dynamic visual analysis, and scalable, event-driven architectures using TIBCO's IT infrastructure. S+ also provides some unique offerings, such as the ability to flexibly and efficiently analyze very large data sets. In this way, I feel companies can maximize the value of their analytic investments to make rapid business decisions, whether those analytics are developed in R or S+. Regards, Lou Bajuk-Yorgan Sr. Director, Product Management TIBCO Spotfire Division lba...@tibco.com -Original Message- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Douglas Bates Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 12:58 PM To: marc_schwa...@comcast.net Cc: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Marc Schwartz marc_schwa...@comcast.net wrote: on 01/07/2009 08:44 AM Kevin E. Thorpe wrote: Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07pr ogram.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power By ASHLEE VANCE SAS says it has noticed R's rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet. Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? Kevin It is an ignorant comment by a marketing person who has been spoon fed her lines...it is also a comment being made from a very defensive and insecure posture. __ R-help@r-project.org 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. -- Regards, Ajay Ohri http://tinyurl.com/liajayohri __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
I believe R as a package has everything people with little knowledge of programming can handle quite easily. Moreover even if someone has no programming knowledge can learn R without much effort. I also believe if people in corporate world start using R instead of other complex software which are very expensive then in this job make we can save many jobs and can also save people. -Original Message- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of ohri2...@gmail.com Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 12:58 AM To: Louis Bajuk-Yorgan Cc: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times Yes I think R as a package can really learn from SAS and SPSS in making GUI more user friendly , even at the risk of dumbing down some complexity.. also as a consultant I know that selling software requires a lot of marketing follow ups..which is why R has lagged behind in actual implementation and marketing ( who will go on site at a client and implement)...despite being more robust and of course helping companies save costs in these critical times. If you market R more and even get a 10 % share of the commercial market, imagine how many jobs you save by cutting down software costs of the employers.. Ajay www.decisionstats.com On 1/8/09, Louis Bajuk-Yorgan lba...@tibco.com wrote: As the product manager for S+, I'd like to comment as well. I think the burgeoning interest in R demonstrates that there's demand for analytics to solve real, business-critical problems in a broad spectrum of companies and roles, and that some of the incumbent analytics offerings, in particular SAS and SPSS, don't sufficiently meet the growing need for analytics in many major companies. S+ (now TIBCO Spotfire S+) is of course a commercial software package based on the S language, which was a forerunner of R as mentioned in the article, and has been widely adopted. It is currently used in a wide variety of areas, including Life Sciences, Financial Services, and Utilities, for applications such as speeding the analysis of clinical trial data, optimizing portfolios, and assessing potential sites for building wind farms. I welcome, respect, and appreciate the vitality, creativity, and sheer productivity of the R community, and the high quality of statistical methods the community creates. And, because of the close historical ties between the two products, it is generally easy to port most R statistics into the commercial S+ environment, and we have worked to make that easier in recent releases. Once in S+, these analytic methods can be incorporated into intuitive tools for business decision makers and deployed to automated environments, using visual workflows, web-based applications (using standard web services), Spotfire Guided Applications for dynamic visual analysis, and scalable, event-driven architectures using TIBCO's IT infrastructure. S+ also provides some unique offerings, such as the ability to flexibly and efficiently analyze very large data sets. In this way, I feel companies can maximize the value of their analytic investments to make rapid business decisions, whether those analytics are developed in R or S+. Regards, Lou Bajuk-Yorgan Sr. Director, Product Management TIBCO Spotfire Division lba...@tibco.com -Original Message- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Douglas Bates Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 12:58 PM To: marc_schwa...@comcast.net Cc: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Marc Schwartz marc_schwa...@comcast.net wrote: on 01/07/2009 08:44 AM Kevin E. Thorpe wrote: Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07p r ogram.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power By ASHLEE VANCE SAS says it has noticed R's rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet. Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? Kevin It is an ignorant comment by a marketing person who has been spoon fed her lines...it is also a comment being made from a very defensive and insecure posture. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
on 01/08/2009 01:12 PM Andrew Choens wrote: On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 10:42 -0600, Stas Kolenikov wrote: A really good measure for R will be the total # of the downloads of r-base for all platforms from all CRAN mirrors (and I would expect that # can be found from the servers' logs). Given that it is so easy to download everything nice and clean and up to date, I would doubt anybody will be distributing CD-ROMs with R install files among friends and colleagues. SAS (and Stata, and SPSS, and Minitab, and...) should have their (internal) number of licenses sold (and yes those come on the disks initially), but those are badly blurred by the network licenses, and are commercial secrets, anyway. The number of r-core downloads is definitely NOT representative of the number of people using R. If you use R on Windows or OS X, you will obviously download R from the mirrors. However, this methodology would effectively ignore many users of R on Linux. I use R on a regular basis and I have it installed on three separate systems, all running Ubuntu. In all of these cases, I am downloading and installing r-core from the Ubuntu Mirror in the USA, not from CRAN. I would also note that R has been available via the Fedora yum repos for some time, which as with the Debian/Ubuntu repos, would be missed in just counting CRAN downloads. There are quite a few other Linux distributions that have a similar infrastructure in place where R is available as an 'add-on' or where the main distribution itself includes R. Additionally, there are many folks who will build R from source code, using the updated source tarballs via FTP or, as I do, by getting the source code right from the R subversion repo. These too would not be considered in a CRAN based count. Of course, the number of Linux users is miniscule compared to the number of Windows users, but I think it is safe to say the Linux users are, in general, a more tech-savvy group than Windows users and are more likely to be comfortable using R's interactive programming interface. I think it is also fair to say that MANY (though not all) Linux users would be uncomfortable installing SPSS or SAS or Stata onto their open-source system and would prefer to use R. Thus, Linux users probably account for a higher proportion of R's user-base than they do in the general computing population. . . . although I do not claim to actually know this proportion. Ehh. Comparing the popularity of computer software is incredibly tricky to do, especially when some of the software being compared in open-source. Correct. Trying extrapolate the number of users from any of these measures is quite complex, if doable at all. Even using the posting frequencies as I did yesterday, needs to be taken with a grain of salt in trying to attempt to get a sense of growth. As Dirk noted, the many R-SIG-* e-mail lists have offloaded some level of traffic from R-Help, which may account for the rate of growth in the R-Help posts declining somewhat since 2004 as Gabor pointed out, even though the absolute number of annual posts continues to increase. Reading the posts on SAS-L since yesterday via Google RSS, where the NYT article was also posted, some have noted that SAS itself offers online support forums (http://support.sas.com/forums/index.jspa). From a quick review, it looks like the SAS.com forums date back to perhaps early 2006, thus possibly accounting for some of the leveling of the posts on SAS-L recently. HTH, Marc Schwartz __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 13:52 -0600, Marc Schwartz wrote: Reading the posts on SAS-L since yesterday via Google RSS, where the NYT article was also posted, some have noted that SAS itself offers online support forums (http://support.sas.com/forums/index.jspa). From a quick review, it looks like the SAS.com forums date back to perhaps early 2006, thus possibly accounting for some of the leveling of the posts on SAS-L recently. Hello, Not only that: the corporate intranet of SAS (sections of which are sometime open for external consultants for certain products) also contain forums with an uneven traffic flow. These will certainly absorb part of the traffic that would otherwise hit lists like SAS-L. In fact, in my five years experience working (also as) a SAS consultant, I have never posted to SAS-L. However, I have posted (or had my requests posted by other SAS employees) on these lists. Having said that, I should also add that R represents a threat to SAS (which does not stand for Statistical Analysis System for a long time already) in a business segment that very doubtfully accounts for more than 5-10% of their revenue. They have to sell about 1000 licenses of SAS/BASE and SAS/STAT in order to match the annual revenues from a single license for a single solution in a single top tier bank. It is quite amusing, though, to browse SAS marketing internal documentation --to which I had access some time ago-- on how to compete against R. The SAS salesperson statement in the article seems to have been extracted verbatim from them. Best regards, Carlos J. Gil Bellosta http://www.datanalytics.com __ R-help@r-project.org 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] R in the NY Times
This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power By ASHLEE VANCE To some people R is just the 18th letter of the alphabet. To others, it’s the rating on racy movies, a measure of an attic’s insulation or what pirates in movies say. R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it. But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use. “R is really important to the point that it’s hard to overvalue it,” said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.” It is also free. R is an open-source program, and its popularity reflects a shift in the type of software used inside corporations. Open-source software is free for anyone to use and modify. I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Dell make billions of dollars a year selling servers that run the open-source Linux operating system, which competes with Windows from Microsoft. Most Web sites are displayed using an open-source application called Apache, and companies increasingly rely on the open-source MySQL database to store their critical information. Many people view the end results of all this technology via the Firefox Web browser, also open-source software. R is similar to other programming languages, like C, Java and Perl, in that it helps people perform a wide variety of computing tasks by giving them access to various commands. For statisticians, however, R is particularly useful because it contains a number of built-in mechanisms for organizing data, running calculations on the information and creating graphical representations of data sets. Some people familiar with R describe it as a supercharged version of Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software that can help illuminate data trends more clearly than is possible by entering information into rows and columns. What makes R so useful — and helps explain its quick acceptance — is that statisticians, engineers and scientists can improve the software’s code or write variations for specific tasks. Packages written for R add advanced algorithms, colored and textured graphs and mining techniques to dig deeper into databases. Close to 1,600 different packages reside on just one of the many Web sites devoted to R, and the number of packages has grown exponentially. One package, called BiodiversityR, offers a graphical interface aimed at making calculations of environmental trends easier. Another package, called Emu, analyzes speech patterns, while GenABEL is used to study the human genome. The financial services community has demonstrated a particular affinity for R; dozens of packages exist for derivatives analysis alone. “The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that’s already available, so you’re standing on the shoulders of giants.” R first appeared in 1996, when the statistics professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland in New Zealand released the code as a free software package. According to them, the notion of devising something like R sprang up during a hallway conversation. They both wanted technology better suited for their statistics students, who needed to analyze data and produce graphical models of the information. Most comparable software had been designed by computer scientists and proved hard to use. Lacking deep computer science training, the professors considered their coding efforts more of an academic game than anything else. Nonetheless, starting in about 1991, they worked on R full time. “We were pretty much inseparable for five or six years,” Mr. Gentleman said. “One person would do the typing and one person would do the thinking.” Some statisticians who took an early look at the software considered it rough around the edges. But despite its shortcomings, R immediately gained a following with people who saw the possibilities in customizing the free software. John M. Chambers, a former Bell Labs researcher who is now a consulting professor of statistics at Stanford University, was an early champion. At Bell Labs, Mr. Chambers had helped develop S, another statistics software
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Pardon my exuberance, but this is simply awesome. What a treat to find on the front web page of the NY Times this morning under Technology. I think the article is very well written by the author, and I think it captures top highlights of why the software and community are so special. Continued high gratitude to all of R-core and the R community for its unique accomplishments. Every bit of praise is well-earned and deserved. I have continuously claimed to colleagues (primarily pharma industry) for the past 8 years or so that R is the most exciting going on in the area of statistics. Thanks, Bill Bill Pikounis Statistician On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 08:10, Zaslavsky, Alan M. zasla...@hcp.med.harvard.edu wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power By ASHLEE VANCE __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
This is great to see. It's interesting that SAS Institute feels that non-peer-reviewed software with hidden implementations of analytic methods that cannot be reproduced by others should be trusted when building aircraft engines. Frank Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power By ASHLEE VANCE To some people R is just the 18th letter of the alphabet. To others, it’s the rating on racy movies, a measure of an attic’s insulation or what pirates in movies say. R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it. But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use. “R is really important to the point that it’s hard to overvalue it,” said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.” It is also free. R is an open-source program, and its popularity reflects a shift in the type of software used inside corporations. Open-source software is free for anyone to use and modify. I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Dell make billions of dollars a year selling servers that run the open-source Linux operating system, which competes with Windows from Microsoft. Most Web sites are displayed using an open-source application called Apache, and companies increasingly rely on the open-source MySQL database to store their critical information. Many people view the end results of all this technology via the Firefox Web browser, also open-source software. R is similar to other programming languages, like C, Java and Perl, in that it helps people perform a wide variety of computing tasks by giving them access to various commands. For statisticians, however, R is particularly useful because it contains a number of built-in mechanisms for organizing data, running calculations on the information and creating graphical representations of data sets. Some people familiar with R describe it as a supercharged version of Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software that can help illuminate data trends more clearly than is possible by entering information into rows and columns. What makes R so useful — and helps explain its quick acceptance — is that statisticians, engineers and scientists can improve the software’s code or write variations for specific tasks. Packages written for R add advanced algorithms, colored and textured graphs and mining techniques to dig deeper into databases. Close to 1,600 different packages reside on just one of the many Web sites devoted to R, and the number of packages has grown exponentially. One package, called BiodiversityR, offers a graphical interface aimed at making calculations of environmental trends easier. Another package, called Emu, analyzes speech patterns, while GenABEL is used to study the human genome. The financial services community has demonstrated a particular affinity for R; dozens of packages exist for derivatives analysis alone. “The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that’s already available, so you’re standing on the shoulders of giants.” R first appeared in 1996, when the statistics professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland in New Zealand released the code as a free software package. According to them, the notion of devising something like R sprang up during a hallway conversation. They both wanted technology better suited for their statistics students, who needed to analyze data and produce graphical models of the information. Most comparable software had been designed by computer scientists and proved hard to use. Lacking deep computer science training, the professors considered their coding efforts more of an academic game than anything else. Nonetheless, starting in about 1991, they worked on R full time. “We were pretty much inseparable for five or six years,” Mr. Gentleman said. “One person would do the typing and one person would do the thinking.” Some statisticians who took an early look at the software considered it rough around the edges. But despite its shortcomings, R immediately gained a following with people who saw the
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Bill Pikounis wrote: Pardon my exuberance, but this is simply awesome. What a treat to find on the front web page of the NY Times this morning under Technology. I think the article is very well written by the author, and I think it captures top highlights of why the software and community are so special. Continued high gratitude to all of R-core and the R community for its unique accomplishments. Every bit of praise is well-earned and deserved. I have continuously claimed to colleagues (primarily pharma industry) for the past 8 years or so that R is the most exciting going on in the area of statistics. Thanks, Bill Amen to that, and in addition, R is now the top tool for everyday analysis, not just a research statistician's tool. Frank Bill Pikounis Statistician On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 08:10, Zaslavsky, Alan M. zasla...@hcp.med.harvard.edu wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power By ASHLEE VANCE __ R-help@r-project.org 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. -- Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
I would like to add that I would have spent many more years doing my PhD if it wasnt for R! all data management, statistics and graphics were conducted using it. This was the direction my university and many more research institutes appear to be heading. It probably doesnt get said enough and I am sure I speak for all young researchers I am very much in debt for all the kind souls who have helped me and other newbies on this forum over the years, Thanks very much R team. - Original Message - From: Frank E Harrell Jr f.harr...@vanderbilt.edu To: Bill Pikounis billpikou...@gmail.com Cc: r-help@r-project.org Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 2:25 PM Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times Bill Pikounis wrote: Pardon my exuberance, but this is simply awesome. What a treat to find on the front web page of the NY Times this morning under Technology. I think the article is very well written by the author, and I think it captures top highlights of why the software and community are so special. Continued high gratitude to all of R-core and the R community for its unique accomplishments. Every bit of praise is well-earned and deserved. I have continuously claimed to colleagues (primarily pharma industry) for the past 8 years or so that R is the most exciting going on in the area of statistics. Thanks, Bill Amen to that, and in addition, R is now the top tool for everyday analysis, not just a research statistician's tool. Frank Bill Pikounis Statistician On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 08:10, Zaslavsky, Alan M. zasla...@hcp.med.harvard.edu wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power By ASHLEE VANCE __ R-help@r-project.org 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. -- Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University __ R-help@r-project.org 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@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power By ASHLEE VANCE SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.” Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? Kevin -- Kevin E. Thorpe Biostatistician/Trialist, Knowledge Translation Program Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health University of Toronto email: kevin.tho...@utoronto.ca Tel: 416.864.5776 Fax: 416.864.6057 __ R-help@r-project.org 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] R in the NY Times-IAsians perspective
R and its GUI Rattle helped me establish a data mining consulting startup on my own, without taking bank credit . People I met on the forum and especially books like rforsasandspssusers.com/ http://rforsasandspssusers.com/ helped me ease the transition to the new Object Oriented method from the earlier - even a monkey can create shakespeare if he types enough kind of analytics software. .Since I am in India , the cost differences can cause almost a digital divide in who can and who cant use sophisticated software. Thanks to the Angels hereYes we Can R... Regards, Ajay www.decisionstats.com On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:03 PM, Simon Pickett simon.pick...@bto.org wrote: I would like to add that I would have spent many more years doing my PhD if it wasnt for R! all data management, statistics and graphics were conducted using it. This was the direction my university and many more research institutes appear to be heading. It probably doesnt get said enough and I am sure I speak for all young researchers I am very much in debt for all the kind souls who have helped me and other newbies on this forum over the years, Thanks very much R team. - Original Message - From: Frank E Harrell Jr f.harr...@vanderbilt.edu To: Bill Pikounis billpikou...@gmail.com Cc: r-help@r-project.org Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 2:25 PM Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times Bill Pikounis wrote: Pardon my exuberance, but this is simply awesome. What a treat to find on the front web page of the NY Times this morning under Technology. I think the article is very well written by the author, and I think it captures top highlights of why the software and community are so special. Continued high gratitude to all of R-core and the R community for its unique accomplishments. Every bit of praise is well-earned and deserved. I have continuously claimed to colleagues (primarily pharma industry) for the past 8 years or so that R is the most exciting going on in the area of statistics. Thanks, Bill Amen to that, and in addition, R is now the top tool for everyday analysis, not just a research statistician's tool. Frank Bill Pikounis Statistician On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 08:10, Zaslavsky, Alan M. zasla...@hcp.med.harvard.edu wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power By ASHLEE VANCE __ R-help@r-project.org 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. -- Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University __ R-help@r-project.org 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@r-project.org 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. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
on 01/07/2009 08:44 AM Kevin E. Thorpe wrote: Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power By ASHLEE VANCE SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.” Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? Kevin It is an ignorant comment by a marketing person who has been spoon fed her lines...it is also a comment being made from a very defensive and insecure posture. Congrats to R Core and the R Community. This is yet another sign of R's growth and maturity. Regards, Marc Schwartz __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Thank you for posting this, I found it a very enjoyable read! I am curious, is there an archive of 'R in the Media' or 'R in the Press' articles somewhere? It would be interesting to see how the perception of R has changed/evolved over time relative to other packages. Cheers, Tony Breyal On 7 Jan, 13:10, Zaslavsky, Alan M. zasla...@hcp.med.harvard.edu wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07pro... January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power By ASHLEE VANCE To some people R is just the 18th letter of the alphabet. To others, it’s the rating on racy movies, a measure of an attic’s insulation or what pirates in movies say. R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it. But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use. “R is really important to the point that it’s hard to overvalue it,” said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.” It is also free. R is an open-source program, and its popularity reflects a shift in the type of software used inside corporations. Open-source software is free for anyone to use and modify. I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Dell make billions of dollars a year selling servers that run the open-source Linux operating system, which competes with Windows from Microsoft. Most Web sites are displayed using an open-source application called Apache, and companies increasingly rely on the open-source MySQL database to store their critical information. Many people view the end results of all this technology via the Firefox Web browser, also open-source software. R is similar to other programming languages, like C, Java and Perl, in that it helps people perform a wide variety of computing tasks by giving them access to various commands. For statisticians, however, R is particularly useful because it contains a number of built-in mechanisms for organizing data, running calculations on the information and creating graphical representations of data sets. Some people familiar with R describe it as a supercharged version of Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software that can help illuminate data trends more clearly than is possible by entering information into rows and columns. What makes R so useful — and helps explain its quick acceptance — is that statisticians, engineers and scientists can improve the software’s code or write variations for specific tasks. Packages written for R add advanced algorithms, colored and textured graphs and mining techniques to dig deeper into databases. Close to 1,600 different packages reside on just one of the many Web sites devoted to R, and the number of packages has grown exponentially. One package, called BiodiversityR, offers a graphical interface aimed at making calculations of environmental trends easier. Another package, called Emu, analyzes speech patterns, while GenABEL is used to study the human genome. The financial services community has demonstrated a particular affinity for R; dozens of packages exist for derivatives analysis alone. “The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that’s already available, so you’re standing on the shoulders of giants.” R first appeared in 1996, when the statistics professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland in New Zealand released the code as a free software package. According to them, the notion of devising something like R sprang up during a hallway conversation. They both wanted technology better suited for their statistics students, who needed to analyze data and produce graphical models of the information. Most comparable software had been designed by computer scientists and proved hard to use. Lacking deep computer science training, the professors considered their coding efforts more of an academic game than anything else. Nonetheless, starting in about 1991, they worked on R full time. “We were pretty much inseparable for five or six years,” Mr. Gentleman said. “One person would do the typing and one person would do the thinking.” Some statisticians who took
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html Thanks for the heads up. The R morale is going through the roof! I've given three courses on R since the second half of 2007 here in Chile (geostatistics, Fisheries Libraries for R, and generalized linear models) and all my three audiences (professionals working in academia, government, and private research institutions) were very much impressed by the power of R. I spent as much time on R itself as on the statistical topics, since students wanted to learn data management and graphics once they started to grasp the basic elements. R creators, Core Team, package creators and maintainers, and experts on the list, thanks so much for such a great work and such an open attitude. You lead by example. Rubén __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
The article quotes John Chambers, but it doesn't mention that R started out as an implementation of the S language. I don't suppose Insightful is too happy about that. The SAS spokesman quoted in the article is clearly whistling past the graveyard. -- Jeff __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 08:00:28AM -0600, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote: This is great to see. It's interesting that SAS Institute feels that non-peer-reviewed software with hidden implementations of analytic methods that cannot be reproduced by others should be trusted when building aircraft engines. Frank Unfortunately, that type of FUD issued by the SAS marketing person still works. I see it at my employer (a large healthcare company.) It's a battle to change a culture, but ironically the recession helps. People are now taking notice of the obscene licensing fees for SAS. Darin __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On 1/7/2009 9:44 AM, Kevin E. Thorpe wrote: Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power By ASHLEE VANCE SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.” Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? To me it just seemed like a blast from the past. Duncan Murdoch __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Jeffrey J. Hallman wrote: The article quotes John Chambers, but it doesn't mention that R started out as an implementation of the S language. I don't suppose Insightful is too happy about that. You mean Tibco... The statement that S failed to generate broad interest is also a bit misleading. I believe S-PLUS had more than 10 users in its day, although it may be true that its success was mainly in the academic world. Obviously the pool of people who knew S from the preceding decade was very important for the early development of R. -- O__ Peter Dalgaard Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~ - (p.dalga...@biostat.ku.dk) FAX: (+45) 35327907 __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
You can look on the SAS message boards and see there is a proportional downturn in traffic. I think that I actually made this statement about both the SAS and Splus traffic... I wasn't really trying to be critical of SAS. I was trying to get across that SAS focused their resources on features that had nothing to do with *statistical analysis* (e.g. data warehousing etc.) -- Max __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 6:39 AM, Tony Breyal tony.bre...@googlemail.com wrote: Thank you for posting this, I found it a very enjoyable read! I am curious, is there an archive of 'R in the Media' or 'R in the Press' articles somewhere? It would be interesting to see how the perception of R has changed/evolved over time relative to other packages. That's a great idea, and I just created an Rmedia category on the REvolutions R blog to track exactly such articles. You can find it here: http://blog.revolution-computing.com/rmedia/ If anyone knows of any other mainstream articles about R available online please let me know, and I'll do a round-up post in that section to make sure they're captured. By the way, we're writing about R and issues related to R daily at: http://blog.revolution-computing.com # David Smith -- David M Smith da...@revolution-computing.com Director of Community, REvolution Computing www.revolution-computing.com Tel: +1 (206) 577-4778 x3203 (Seattle, USA) __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
I believe the SAS person shot themselves in the foot more in more ways than one. In my mind, the reason you would pay, as Frank said, for non-peer-reviewed software with hidden implementations of analytic methods that cannot be reproduced by others Would be so that you can sue them later when a software problem in the designing of the engine makes your plane fall out of the sky! Bryan * Bryan Hanson Professor of Chemistry Biochemistry DePauw University, Greencastle IN USA ³I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, ³We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.² Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? Kevin __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
I would also point out that the use of the term freeware as opposed to FOSS by the SAS rep, comes off as being unprofessional and deliberately condescending... The author of the article, to his credit, was pretty consistent in using open source terminology. Regards, Marc on 01/07/2009 10:26 AM Bryan Hanson wrote: I believe the SAS person shot themselves in the foot more in more ways than one. In my mind, the reason you would pay, as Frank said, for non-peer-reviewed software with hidden implementations of analytic methods that cannot be reproduced by others Would be so that you can sue them later when a software problem in the designing of the engine makes your plane fall out of the sky! __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Unfortunately, that type of FUD issued by the SAS marketing person still works. I see it at my employer (a large healthcare company.) It's a battle to change a culture, but ironically the recession helps. People are now taking notice of the obscene licensing fees for SAS. Darin I agree. I work for a consulting firm (human services) and my boss prefers us to use SPSS, rather than R. It's painful. I have version 11 installed on my Windows laptop. Next year, the license expires! For someone coming from a SPSS background, R is a little mind-blowing, simply because it is so much more powerful. But, perseverance pays off. Once I master Sweave and such, I'll be able to churn out reports much more quickly than I ever could with SPSS. I do wish the author of the article had included comments from SPSS, in addition to the humorous FUD from the SAS spokesperson. Newer versions of SPSS actually have the option of using R for data analysis, in addition to the SPSS engine. It would have been interesting to compare the corporate responses of the two companies. -- Insert something humorous here. :-) __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
you can use google alerts to track media coverage of R using some keywords regards, ajay On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:52 PM, David M Smith da...@revolution-computing.com wrote: On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 6:39 AM, Tony Breyal tony.bre...@googlemail.com wrote: Thank you for posting this, I found it a very enjoyable read! I am curious, is there an archive of 'R in the Media' or 'R in the Press' articles somewhere? It would be interesting to see how the perception of R has changed/evolved over time relative to other packages. That's a great idea, and I just created an Rmedia category on the REvolutions R blog to track exactly such articles. You can find it here: http://blog.revolution-computing.com/rmedia/ If anyone knows of any other mainstream articles about R available online please let me know, and I'll do a round-up post in that section to make sure they're captured. By the way, we're writing about R and issues related to R daily at: http://blog.revolution-computing.com # David Smith -- David M Smith da...@revolution-computing.com Director of Community, REvolution Computing www.revolution-computing.com Tel: +1 (206) 577-4778 x3203 (Seattle, USA) __ R-help@r-project.org 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. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On 07-Jan-09 18:03:19, Erik Iverson wrote: I pointed a friend of mine toward the article, to which he replied: I hope that they run SAS on Solaris too, god only knows how tainted the syscalls are in that linux freeware. Of course, now Solaris is 'freeware', too, so I suppose that according to SAS, running SAS on Windows is the best way to be sure you're getting the right answers. I'm not so sure about that. Since the article described R as a supercharged version of Microsoft's Excel, surely people should run R on Windows and be *ab*so*lute*ly* sure of getting the right answers (and supercharged to boot) Ted. On Wed, 07 Jan 2009 10:56:53 -0600, Marc Schwartz marc_schwa...@comcast.net wrote: I would also point out that the use of the term freeware as opposed to FOSS by the SAS rep, comes off as being unprofessional and deliberately condescending... The author of the article, to his credit, was pretty consistent in using open source terminology. Regards, Marc on 01/07/2009 10:26 AM Bryan Hanson wrote: I believe the SAS person shot themselves in the foot more in more ways than one. In my mind, the reason you would pay, as Frank said, for non-peer-reviewed software with hidden implementations of analytic methods that cannot be reproduced by others Would be so that you can sue them later when a software problem in the designing of the engine makes your plane fall out of the sky! __ R-help@r-project.org 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@r-project.org 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. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.hard...@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 07-Jan-09 Time: 18:30:39 -- XFMail -- __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
2009/1/7 Darin A. England engl...@cs.umn.edu: Unfortunately, that type of FUD issued by the SAS marketing person still works. I see it at my employer (a large healthcare company.) I see it here, at a university. Quote: We couldn't possibly do our analysis using some software we've just downloaded from a web site *facepalm* It's a battle to change a culture, but ironically the recession helps. People are now taking notice of the obscene licensing fees for SAS. They'll just keep increasing their educational discount, or as we say, the first hit is free... BaRRy __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Google Alerts are great, but unfortuantly the brevity of R's name is the main problem i think. though, thinking about it, i suppose if one could work out the 'best' key words to use, it might be possible to not get too many miss- classified results, e.g., http://news.google.com/news?hl=enned=usnolr=1q=r+open+source+programming+languagebtnG=Search or something like that. Will be keeping an eye on David's page from time to time though, just in case he catches anything :-) lovely to see R getting the attention it so rightly deserves. On 7 Jan, 18:29, Ajay ohri ohri2...@gmail.com wrote: you can use google alerts to track media coverage of R using some keywords regards, ajay On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:52 PM, David M Smith da...@revolution-computing.com wrote: On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 6:39 AM, Tony Breyal tony.bre...@googlemail.com wrote: Thank you for posting this, I found it a very enjoyable read! I am curious, is there an archive of 'R in the Media' or 'R in the Press' articles somewhere? It would be interesting to see how the perception of R has changed/evolved over time relative to other packages. That's a great idea, and I just created an Rmedia category on the REvolutions R blog to track exactly such articles. You can find it here: http://blog.revolution-computing.com/rmedia/ If anyone knows of any other mainstream articles about R available online please let me know, and I'll do a round-up post in that section to make sure they're captured. By the way, we're writing about R and issues related to R daily at: http://blog.revolution-computing.com # David Smith -- David M Smith da...@revolution-computing.com Director of Community, REvolution Computingwww.revolution-computing.com Tel: +1 (206) 577-4778 x3203 (Seattle, USA) __ r-h...@r-project.org 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. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] __ r-h...@r-project.org mailing listhttps://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guidehttp://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Kevin E. Thorpe wrote: Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.” Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? there must be something wrong with me, but i can't find anything 'humorous yet arrogant and short-sighted' in the idea that engines for aircraft be built with software that does not advertise itself with 'ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.' vQ __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
on 01/07/2009 09:29 AM Max Kuhn wrote:
You can look on the SAS message boards and see there is a proportional
downturn in traffic.
I think that I actually made this statement about both the SAS and
Splus traffic...
I wasn't really trying to be critical of SAS. I was trying to get
across that SAS focused their resources on features that had nothing
to do with *statistical analysis* (e.g. data warehousing etc.)
Presuming that the Google Groups archive of SAS-L is reasonably complete:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.sas/about
The monthly posting frequency data since 1993 is:
Posts - structure(list(Jan = c(NA, 546L, 548L, 853L, 1007L, 894L, 514L,
1720L, 1826L, 1941L, 1832L, 1636L, 2122L, 2722L, 2750L, 2305L,
357L), Feb = c(NA, 511L, 734L, 1024L, 1150L, 1068L, 493L, 1519L,
1537L, 1845L, 1846L, 1652L, 1960L, 1645L, 926L, 2255L, NA), Mar = c(NA,
658L, 963L, 805L, 1108L, 945L, 659L, 1177L, 1915L, 2010L, 1755L,
2188L, 629L, 1711L, 1728L, 2712L, NA), Apr = c(NA, 681L, 792L,
1052L, 1315L, 784L, 1077L, 1163L, 1467L, 2199L, 1757L, 1826L,
2169L, 2796L, 2766L, 2789L, NA), May = c(NA, 712L, 945L, 1163L,
1212L, 448L, 778L, 1963L, 1735L, 2373L, 1863L, 1836L, 2283L,
3147L, 2974L, 2025L, NA), Jun = c(NA, 751L, 1002L, 999L, 1127L,
813L, 540L, 1615L, 1905L, 2133L, 1701L, 2606L, 2407L, 2723L,
2691L, 2368L, NA), Jul = c(15L, 763L, 775L, 1184L, 1074L, 896L,
476L, 1572L, 2027L, 2445L, 1926L, 1843L, 2061L, 761L, 2435L,
2607L, NA), Aug = c(458L, 975L, 969L, 1053L, 692L, 823L, 612L,
1696L, 1976L, 1492L, 1689L, 2143L, 1793L, 2027L, 2592L, 2584L,
NA), Sep = c(330L, 703L, 745L, 1176L, 947L, 894L, 1351L, 1491L,
1439L, 1864L, 1646L, 1784L, 1365L, 2714L, 1868L, 2554L, NA),
Oct = c(219L, 805L, 691L, 1197L, 900L, 1129L, 1708L, 1669L,
1592L, 2133L, 1832L, 1712L, 1427L, 2983L, 2320L, 2434L, NA
), Nov = c(472L, 752L, 773L, 911L, 853L, 733L, 1720L, 1490L,
1636L, 1663L, 1545L, 1786L, 1518L, 2848L, 2112L, 1984L, NA
), Dec = c(517L, 666L, 765L, 844L, 677L, 492L, 1595L, 1298L,
1424L, 1520L, 1445L, 2148L, 1524L, 2374L, 1948L, 1921L, NA
)), .Names = c(Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun,
Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec), class = data.frame,
row.names = c(1993,
1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001,
2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
))
Posts
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
1993 NA NA NA NA NA NA 15 458 330 219 472 517
1994 546 511 658 681 712 751 763 975 703 805 752 666
1995 548 734 963 792 945 1002 775 969 745 691 773 765
1996 853 1024 805 1052 1163 999 1184 1053 1176 1197 911 844
1997 1007 1150 1108 1315 1212 1127 1074 692 947 900 853 677
1998 894 1068 945 784 448 813 896 823 894 1129 733 492
1999 514 493 659 1077 778 540 476 612 1351 1708 1720 1595
2000 1720 1519 1177 1163 1963 1615 1572 1696 1491 1669 1490 1298
2001 1826 1537 1915 1467 1735 1905 2027 1976 1439 1592 1636 1424
2002 1941 1845 2010 2199 2373 2133 2445 1492 1864 2133 1663 1520
2003 1832 1846 1755 1757 1863 1701 1926 1689 1646 1832 1545 1445
2004 1636 1652 2188 1826 1836 2606 1843 2143 1784 1712 1786 2148
2005 2122 1960 629 2169 2283 2407 2061 1793 1365 1427 1518 1524
2006 2722 1645 1711 2796 3147 2723 761 2027 2714 2983 2848 2374
2007 2750 926 1728 2766 2974 2691 2435 2592 1868 2320 2112 1948
2008 2305 2255 2712 2789 2025 2368 2607 2584 2554 2434 1984 1921
2009 357 NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
One can then review the annual posting frequency via:
pdf(SAS-L.pdf, height = 4, width = 7)
mp - barplot(rowSums(Posts, na.rm = TRUE),
beside = TRUE,
cex.names = 0.6, main = SAS-L Traffic,
cex.axis = 0.75, las = 1)
mtext(text = rowSums(Posts, na.rm = TRUE), at = mp, side = 1,
line = 2, cex = 0.5)
dev.off()
There would appear to be marked increases in 2000 and again in 2006.
However, it has been flat for the past 3 calendar years. No decline yet,
but it will happen in due course...
No comparable posting data table exists for S-News as far as I can find,
so I wrote a quick program to read the S-News archive pages here:
http://www.biostat.wustl.edu/archives/html/s-news/
and get monthly posting counts, using the 'Thread' based html pages,
where each monthly embedded post link has a URL of the form:
http://www.biostat.wustl.edu/archives/html/s-news/-MM/msgX.html
Thus, the program I used is:
TD - paste(rep(1998:2009, each = 12), sprintf(%02d, 1:12), sep = -)
Posts - numeric(length(TD))
for (i in seq(along = TD))
{
URL - paste(http://www.biostat.wustl.edu/archives/html/s-news/;,
TD[i], /threads.html, sep = )
cat(URL, \n)
if (!inherits(try(con - readLines(URL)), try-error))
{
Posts[i] - length(grep(msg.*\\.html, con))
rm(con)
} else {
Posts[i] - NA
}
}
Posts - matrix(Posts, ncol = 12, byrow = TRUE)
rownames(Posts) - 1998:2009
colnames(Posts) - month.abb
That gives you:
Posts -
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
What kind of warranty does SAS offer? I haven't read their EULA recently, but if an airplane fell out of the sky because of a bug in SAS code, I'd be surprised if SAS was eager to pay damages! Spencer Wacek Kusnierczyk wrote: Kevin E. Thorpe wrote: Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.” Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? there must be something wrong with me, but i can't find anything 'humorous yet arrogant and short-sighted' in the idea that engines for aircraft be built with software that does not advertise itself with 'ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.' vQ __ R-help@r-project.org 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@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On 1/7/2009 3:03 PM, Wacek Kusnierczyk wrote: Kevin E. Thorpe wrote: Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.” Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? there must be something wrong with me, but i can't find anything 'humorous yet arrogant and short-sighted' in the idea that engines for aircraft be built with software that does not advertise itself with 'ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.' Yes, everyone knows that the lack of warranty should be hidden in the fine print, and say something like this: Institute warrants that the media on which SAS/C OnlineDoc is furnished will be free from defects in material and workmanship under normal use for a period of ninety (90) days from the date of delivery of SAS/C OnlineDoc. Licensee’s exclusive remedy for breach of this warranty shall be replacement of the defective media by the Institute. Institute and its licensors disclaim all other warranties, express or implied, including, but not limited to, any implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose whether alleged to arise by law, by reason of custom or usage in the trade, or by course of dealing. (Sorry, I couldn't find SAS/Stat's lack of warranty. I found this one at http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/sasc/doc700/html/common/agreement.htm) Duncan Murdoch __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Spencer Graves spencer.gra...@pdf.com wrote: What kind of warranty does SAS offer? I haven't read their EULA recently, but if an airplane fell out of the sky because of a bug in SAS code, I'd be surprised if SAS was eager to pay damages! Spencer And that's an issue that always comes up on Linux v. Microsoft -- just because you pay money for it doesn't mean you're buying meaningful guarantees. -- Due to the recession, requests for instant gratification will be deferred until arrears in scheduled gratification have been satisfied. __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Wacek, One would hope that if someone were to use software to build engines for aircraft, that said person would sufficiently test the software to have confidence in it, whether it had a Warranty or not — at least that's my mode of operation… Cheers! Tom Wacek Kusnierczyk wrote: Kevin E. Thorpe wrote: Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code, said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.” Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? there must be something wrong with me, but i can't find anything 'humorous yet arrogant and short-sighted' in the idea that engines for aircraft be built with software that does not advertise itself with 'ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.' vQ __ R-help@r-project.org 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. -- Thomas E Adams National Weather Service Ohio River Forecast Center 1901 South State Route 134 Wilmington, OH 45177 EMAIL: thomas.ad...@noaa.gov VOICE: 937-383-0528 FAX:937-383-0033 __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
I pointed a friend of mine toward the article, to which he replied: I hope that they run SAS on Solaris too, god only knows how tainted the syscalls are in that linux freeware. Of course, now Solaris is 'freeware', too, so I suppose that according to SAS, running SAS on Windows is the best way to be sure you're getting the right answers. On Wed, 07 Jan 2009 10:56:53 -0600, Marc Schwartz marc_schwa...@comcast.net wrote: I would also point out that the use of the term freeware as opposed to FOSS by the SAS rep, comes off as being unprofessional and deliberately condescending... The author of the article, to his credit, was pretty consistent in using open source terminology. Regards, Marc on 01/07/2009 10:26 AM Bryan Hanson wrote: I believe the SAS person shot themselves in the foot more in more ways than one. In my mind, the reason you would pay, as Frank said, for non-peer-reviewed software with hidden implementations of analytic methods that cannot be reproduced by others Would be so that you can sue them later when a software problem in the designing of the engine makes your plane fall out of the sky! __ R-help@r-project.org 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@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Here is the same number of messages/posts data for each of S, SAS, R: - reworked into a 3 column ts class time series - with Jan 2009 removed since its not complete - leading and trailing NA rows removed At end we plot the raw data as well as the time series of totals and show loess smooths for each. By running the code below we see that the: - sum of the three seems to be rising at a constant rate - S is declining - SAS and R are rising - R is rising the fastest through its completed its phase of highest growth which ended around 2004 tt3 - structure(c(15, 458, 330, 219, 472, 517, 546, 511, 658, 681, 712, 751, 763, 975, 703, 805, 752, 666, 548, 734, 963, 792, 945, 1002, 775, 969, 745, 691, 773, 765, 853, 1024, 805, 1052, 1163, 999, 1184, 1053, 1176, 1197, 911, 844, 1007, 1150, 1108, 1315, 1212, 1127, 1074, 692, 947, 900, 853, 677, 894, 1068, 945, 784, 448, 813, 896, 823, 894, 1129, 733, 492, 514, 493, 659, 1077, 778, 540, 476, 612, 1351, 1708, 1720, 1595, 1720, 1519, 1177, 1163, 1963, 1615, 1572, 1696, 1491, 1669, 1490, 1298, 1826, 1537, 1915, 1467, 1735, 1905, 2027, 1976, 1439, 1592, 1636, 1424, 1941, 1845, 2010, 2199, 2373, 2133, 2445, 1492, 1864, 2133, 1663, 1520, 1832, 1846, 1755, 1757, 1863, 1701, 1926, 1689, 1646, 1832, 1545, 1445, 1636, 1652, 2188, 1826, 1836, 2606, 1843, 2143, 1784, 1712, 1786, 2148, 2122, 1960, 629, 2169, 2283, 2407, 2061, 1793, 1365, 1427, 1518, 1524, 2722, 1645, 1711, 2796, 3147, 2723, 761, 2027, 2714, 2983, 2848, 2374, 2750, 926, 1728, 2766, 2974, 2691, 2435, 2592, 1868, 2320, 2112, 1948, 2305, 2255, 2712, 2789, 2025, 2368, 2607, 2584, 2554, 2434, 1984, 1921, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, 273, 378, 293, 330, 243, 219, 209, 191, 241, 181, 141, 210, 173, 313, 300, 334, 254, 284, 270, 300, 253, 300, 194, 264, 313, 285, 264, 306, 247, 245, 302, 204, 251, 261, 176, 246, 232, 252, 300, 331, 282, 258, 260, 260, 229, 232, 194, 230, 255, 242, 228, 219, 248, 230, 207, 221, 280, 228, 177, 189, 179, 218, 196, 189, 217, 221, 187, 186, 295, 197, 142, 197, 230, 257, 151, 164, 175, 154, 187, 195, 150, 176, 176, 174, 161, 193, 182, 174, 109, 159, 144, 107, 98, 82, 84, 109, 87, 99, 123, 107, 96, 84, 97, 68, 73, 53, 20, 51, 59, 74, 48, 46, 34, 47, 39, 35, 70, 56, 41, 48, 63, 58, 47, 31, 27, 40, 28, 41, 30, 27, 36, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, 92, 36, 47, 41, 37, 40, 76, 61, 57, 135, 79, 114, 101, 90, 105, 110, 64, 94, 96, 184, 105, 226, 145, 195, 189, 161, 186, 184, 148, 203, 231, 318, 221, 205, 355, 377, 377, 504, 418, 293, 356, 434, 418, 433, 422, 558, 583, 651, 470, 552, 550, 615, 562, 678, 657, 825, 530, 884, 697, 880, 965, 1057, 926, 918, 824, 705, 1055, 1038, 742, 1017, 1137, 1203, 1488, 1268, 1319, 1344, 1210, 1443, 1567, 1605, 1158, 1116, 1580, 1946, 1657, 1561, 1714, 1618, 1493, 1534, 1712, 1895, 1481, 1746, 1724, 1703, 2057, 1887, 2056, 1872, 1777, 1709, 1810, 1907, 1508, 2075, 1920, 2270, 1818, 2029, 1811, 1785, 1898, 1902, 2328, 2127, 1450, 1714, 1907, 2191, 2145, 2210, 2307, 2138, 2241, 2028, 2708, 2594, 2028, 2490, 2583, 2740, 2487, 2517, 2774, 3268, 2813, 2990, 3037, 2730, 2399), .Dim = c(186L, 3L), .Dimnames = list(NULL, c(SAS, S, R)), .Tsp = c(1993.5, 2008.917, 12), class = c(mts, ts)) tt4 - cbind(tt3, rowSums(tt3)) colnames(tt4) - c(colnames(tt3), Sum) ts.plot(tt4, col = 1:4) grid() legend(topleft, colnames(tt4), lty = 1, col = 1:4) library(dyn) for(i in 1:4) lines(fitted(dyn$loess(tt4[, i] ~ time(tt4))), col = i) On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Marc Schwartz marc_schwa...@comcast.net wrote: on 01/07/2009 09:29 AM Max Kuhn wrote: You can look on the SAS message boards and see there is a proportional downturn in traffic. I think that I actually made this statement about both the SAS and Splus traffic... I wasn't really trying to be critical of SAS. I was trying to get across that SAS focused their resources on features that had nothing to do with *statistical analysis* (e.g. data warehousing etc.) Presuming that the Google Groups archive of SAS-L is reasonably complete: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.sas/about The monthly posting frequency data since 1993 is: Posts - structure(list(Jan = c(NA, 546L, 548L, 853L, 1007L, 894L, 514L, 1720L, 1826L, 1941L, 1832L, 1636L, 2122L, 2722L, 2750L, 2305L, 357L), Feb = c(NA, 511L, 734L, 1024L, 1150L, 1068L, 493L, 1519L, 1537L, 1845L, 1846L, 1652L, 1960L, 1645L, 926L, 2255L, NA), Mar = c(NA, 658L, 963L, 805L, 1108L, 945L, 659L, 1177L, 1915L, 2010L, 1755L, 2188L, 629L, 1711L, 1728L, 2712L, NA), Apr = c(NA, 681L, 792L, 1052L, 1315L, 784L, 1077L, 1163L, 1467L, 2199L, 1757L, 1826L, 2169L, 2796L, 2766L, 2789L, NA), May = c(NA, 712L, 945L, 1163L, 1212L,
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Here's a couple of similar plots created with ggplot2. I chose to turn the data into a data frame with an explicit date column. Using a log scale somewhat stabilises the variability. ## SAS-L traffic sas - structure(list(Jan = c(NA, 546L, 548L, 853L, 1007L, 894L, 514L, 1720L, 1826L, 1941L, 1832L, 1636L, 2122L, 2722L, 2750L, 2305L, 357L), Feb = c(NA, 511L, 734L, 1024L, 1150L, 1068L, 493L, 1519L, 1537L, 1845L, 1846L, 1652L, 1960L, 1645L, 926L, 2255L, NA), Mar = c(NA, 658L, 963L, 805L, 1108L, 945L, 659L, 1177L, 1915L, 2010L, 1755L, 2188L, 629L, 1711L, 1728L, 2712L, NA), Apr = c(NA, 681L, 792L, 1052L, 1315L, 784L, 1077L, 1163L, 1467L, 2199L, 1757L, 1826L, 2169L, 2796L, 2766L, 2789L, NA), May = c(NA, 712L, 945L, 1163L, 1212L, 448L, 778L, 1963L, 1735L, 2373L, 1863L, 1836L, 2283L, 3147L, 2974L, 2025L, NA), Jun = c(NA, 751L, 1002L, 999L, 1127L, 813L, 540L, 1615L, 1905L, 2133L, 1701L, 2606L, 2407L, 2723L, 2691L, 2368L, NA), Jul = c(15L, 763L, 775L, 1184L, 1074L, 896L, 476L, 1572L, 2027L, 2445L, 1926L, 1843L, 2061L, 761L, 2435L, 2607L, NA), Aug = c(458L, 975L, 969L, 1053L, 692L, 823L, 612L, 1696L, 1976L, 1492L, 1689L, 2143L, 1793L, 2027L, 2592L, 2584L, NA), Sep = c(330L, 703L, 745L, 1176L, 947L, 894L, 1351L, 1491L, 1439L, 1864L, 1646L, 1784L, 1365L, 2714L, 1868L, 2554L, NA), Oct = c(219L, 805L, 691L, 1197L, 900L, 1129L, 1708L, 1669L, 1592L, 2133L, 1832L, 1712L, 1427L, 2983L, 2320L, 2434L, NA ), Nov = c(472L, 752L, 773L, 911L, 853L, 733L, 1720L, 1490L, 1636L, 1663L, 1545L, 1786L, 1518L, 2848L, 2112L, 1984L, NA ), Dec = c(517L, 666L, 765L, 844L, 677L, 492L, 1595L, 1298L, 1424L, 1520L, 1445L, 2148L, 1524L, 2374L, 1948L, 1921L, NA )), .Names = c(Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec), class = data.frame, row.names = c(1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 )) ## s-news traffic s - structure(c(NA, 210, 264, 246, 230, 189, 197, 174, 109, 51, 48, 5, 273, 173, 313, 232, 255, 179, 230, 161, 87, 59, 63, NA, 378, 313, 285, 252, 242, 218, 257, 193, 99, 74, 58, NA, 293, 300, 264, 300, 228, 196, 151, 182, 123, 48, 47, NA, 330, 334, 306, 331, 219, 189, 164, 174, 107, 46, 31, NA, 243, 254, 247, 282, 248, 217, 175, 109, 96, 34, 27, NA, 219, 284, 245, 258, 230, 221, 154, 159, 84, 47, 40, NA, 209, 270, 302, 260, 207, 187, 187, 144, 97, 39, 28, NA, 191, 300, 204, 260, 221, 186, 195, 107, 68, 35, 41, NA, 241, 253, 251, 229, 280, 295, 150, 98, 73, 70, 30, NA, 181, 300, 261, 232, 228, 197, 176, 82, 53, 56, 27, NA, 141, 194, 176, 194, 177, 142, 176, 84, 20, 41, 36, NA), .Dim = c(12L, 12L), .Dimnames = list(c(1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009), c(Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec))) r - structure(c(NA, 135, 226, 205, 558, 884, 1017, 1116, 1746, 2075, 1714, 2490, 462, NA, 79, 145, 355, 583, 697, 1137, 1580, 1724, 1920, 1907, 2583, NA, NA, 114, 195, 377, 651, 880, 1203, 1946, 1703, 2270, 2191, 2740, NA, 92, 101, 189, 377, 470, 965, 1488, 1657, 2057, 1818, 2145, 2487, NA, 36, 90, 161, 504, 552, 1057, 1268, 1561, 1887, 2029, 2210, 2517, NA, 47, 105, 186, 418, 550, 926, 1319, 1714, 2056, 1811, 2307, 2774, NA, 41, 110, 184, 293, 615, 918, 1344, 1618, 1872, 1785, 2138, 3268, NA, 37, 64, 148, 356, 562, 824, 1210, 1493, 1777, 1898, 2241, 2813, NA, 40, 94, 203, 434, 678, 705, 1443, 1534, 1709, 1902, 2028, 2990, NA, 76, 96, 231, 418, 657, 1055, 1567, 1712, 1810, 2328, 2708, 3037, NA, 61, 184, 318, 433, 825, 1038, 1605, 1895, 1907, 2127, 2594, 2730, NA, 57, 105, 221, 422, 530, 742, 1158, 1481, 1508, 1450, 2028, 2399, NA), .Dim = c(13L, 12L), .Dimnames = list(c(1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009), c(Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec))) library(reshape) sas - melt(as.matrix(sas), na.rm = TRUE) r - melt(r, na.rm = TRUE) s - melt(s, na.rm = TRUE) names(r) - names(s) - names(sas) - c(year, month, count) sas$software - sas s$software - s r$software - r all - rbind(sas, s, r) all$date - with(all, as.Date(paste(year, month, 15, sep = -), %Y-%b-%d)) library(ggplot2) qplot(date, count, data = all, geom = line, colour = software) + geom_smooth(se = F, size = 1) last_plot() + scale_y_log10(breaks = 10^(1:3), labels = 10^(1:3)) yearly - ddply(all, .(year, software), function(df) c(count = sum(df$count))) qplot(year, count, data = yearly, geom = line, colour = software) Hadley -- http://had.co.nz/ __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
I did try the log version as well prior to posting but although it would seem to exaggerate the difference to me the insights from plotting the raw data with loess (i.e. constancy of the total, piecewise constant growth of R) come through best. On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Spencer Graves spencer.gra...@prodsyse.com wrote: Thanks, Gabor, Marc, Max: The image is even more striking (and more accurately reflects reality, I believe) if you add log='y' to ts.plot. Best Wishes, Spencer Gabor Grothendieck wrote: Here is the same number of messages/posts data for each of S, SAS, R: - reworked into a 3 column ts class time series - with Jan 2009 removed since its not complete - leading and trailing NA rows removed At end we plot the raw data as well as the time series of totals and show loess smooths for each. By running the code below we see that the: - sum of the three seems to be rising at a constant rate - S is declining - SAS and R are rising - R is rising the fastest through its completed its phase of highest growth which ended around 2004 tt3 - structure(c(15, 458, 330, 219, 472, 517, 546, 511, 658, 681, 712, 751, 763, 975, 703, 805, 752, 666, 548, 734, 963, 792, 945, 1002, 775, 969, 745, 691, 773, 765, 853, 1024, 805, 1052, 1163, 999, 1184, 1053, 1176, 1197, 911, 844, 1007, 1150, 1108, 1315, 1212, 1127, 1074, 692, 947, 900, 853, 677, 894, 1068, 945, 784, 448, 813, 896, 823, 894, 1129, 733, 492, 514, 493, 659, 1077, 778, 540, 476, 612, 1351, 1708, 1720, 1595, 1720, 1519, 1177, 1163, 1963, 1615, 1572, 1696, 1491, 1669, 1490, 1298, 1826, 1537, 1915, 1467, 1735, 1905, 2027, 1976, 1439, 1592, 1636, 1424, 1941, 1845, 2010, 2199, 2373, 2133, 2445, 1492, 1864, 2133, 1663, 1520, 1832, 1846, 1755, 1757, 1863, 1701, 1926, 1689, 1646, 1832, 1545, 1445, 1636, 1652, 2188, 1826, 1836, 2606, 1843, 2143, 1784, 1712, 1786, 2148, 2122, 1960, 629, 2169, 2283, 2407, 2061, 1793, 1365, 1427, 1518, 1524, 2722, 1645, 1711, 2796, 3147, 2723, 761, 2027, 2714, 2983, 2848, 2374, 2750, 926, 1728, 2766, 2974, 2691, 2435, 2592, 1868, 2320, 2112, 1948, 2305, 2255, 2712, 2789, 2025, 2368, 2607, 2584, 2554, 2434, 1984, 1921, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, 273, 378, 293, 330, 243, 219, 209, 191, 241, 181, 141, 210, 173, 313, 300, 334, 254, 284, 270, 300, 253, 300, 194, 264, 313, 285, 264, 306, 247, 245, 302, 204, 251, 261, 176, 246, 232, 252, 300, 331, 282, 258, 260, 260, 229, 232, 194, 230, 255, 242, 228, 219, 248, 230, 207, 221, 280, 228, 177, 189, 179, 218, 196, 189, 217, 221, 187, 186, 295, 197, 142, 197, 230, 257, 151, 164, 175, 154, 187, 195, 150, 176, 176, 174, 161, 193, 182, 174, 109, 159, 144, 107, 98, 82, 84, 109, 87, 99, 123, 107, 96, 84, 97, 68, 73, 53, 20, 51, 59, 74, 48, 46, 34, 47, 39, 35, 70, 56, 41, 48, 63, 58, 47, 31, 27, 40, 28, 41, 30, 27, 36, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, 92, 36, 47, 41, 37, 40, 76, 61, 57, 135, 79, 114, 101, 90, 105, 110, 64, 94, 96, 184, 105, 226, 145, 195, 189, 161, 186, 184, 148, 203, 231, 318, 221, 205, 355, 377, 377, 504, 418, 293, 356, 434, 418, 433, 422, 558, 583, 651, 470, 552, 550, 615, 562, 678, 657, 825, 530, 884, 697, 880, 965, 1057, 926, 918, 824, 705, 1055, 1038, 742, 1017, 1137, 1203, 1488, 1268, 1319, 1344, 1210, 1443, 1567, 1605, 1158, 1116, 1580, 1946, 1657, 1561, 1714, 1618, 1493, 1534, 1712, 1895, 1481, 1746, 1724, 1703, 2057, 1887, 2056, 1872, 1777, 1709, 1810, 1907, 1508, 2075, 1920, 2270, 1818, 2029, 1811, 1785, 1898, 1902, 2328, 2127, 1450, 1714, 1907, 2191, 2145, 2210, 2307, 2138, 2241, 2028, 2708, 2594, 2028, 2490, 2583, 2740, 2487, 2517, 2774, 3268, 2813, 2990, 3037, 2730, 2399), .Dim = c(186L, 3L), .Dimnames = list(NULL, c(SAS, S, R)), .Tsp = c(1993.5, 2008.917, 12), class = c(mts, ts)) tt4 - cbind(tt3, rowSums(tt3)) colnames(tt4) - c(colnames(tt3), Sum) ts.plot(tt4, col = 1:4) grid() legend(topleft, colnames(tt4), lty = 1, col = 1:4) library(dyn) for(i in 1:4) lines(fitted(dyn$loess(tt4[, i] ~ time(tt4))), col = i) On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Marc Schwartz marc_schwa...@comcast.net wrote: on 01/07/2009 09:29 AM Max Kuhn wrote: You can look on the SAS message boards and see there is a proportional downturn in traffic. I think that I actually made this statement about both the SAS and Splus traffic... I wasn't really trying to be critical of SAS. I was trying to get across that SAS focused their resources on features that had nothing to do with *statistical analysis* (e.g. data warehousing etc.) Presuming that the Google Groups archive of SAS-L is reasonably complete:
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Here's a couple of similar plots created with ggplot2. I chose to turn the data into a data frame with an explicit date column. Using a log scale somewhat stabilises the variability. ## SAS-L traffic sas - structure(list(Jan = c(NA, 546L, 548L, 853L, 1007L, 894L, 514L, 1720L, 1826L, 1941L, 1832L, 1636L, 2122L, 2722L, 2750L, 2305L, 357L), Feb = c(NA, 511L, 734L, 1024L, 1150L, 1068L, 493L, 1519L, 1537L, 1845L, 1846L, 1652L, 1960L, 1645L, 926L, 2255L, NA), Mar = c(NA, 658L, 963L, 805L, 1108L, 945L, 659L, 1177L, 1915L, 2010L, 1755L, 2188L, 629L, 1711L, 1728L, 2712L, NA), Apr = c(NA, 681L, 792L, 1052L, 1315L, 784L, 1077L, 1163L, 1467L, 2199L, 1757L, 1826L, 2169L, 2796L, 2766L, 2789L, NA), May = c(NA, 712L, 945L, 1163L, 1212L, 448L, 778L, 1963L, 1735L, 2373L, 1863L, 1836L, 2283L, 3147L, 2974L, 2025L, NA), Jun = c(NA, 751L, 1002L, 999L, 1127L, 813L, 540L, 1615L, 1905L, 2133L, 1701L, 2606L, 2407L, 2723L, 2691L, 2368L, NA), Jul = c(15L, 763L, 775L, 1184L, 1074L, 896L, 476L, 1572L, 2027L, 2445L, 1926L, 1843L, 2061L, 761L, 2435L, 2607L, NA), Aug = c(458L, 975L, 969L, 1053L, 692L, 823L, 612L, 1696L, 1976L, 1492L, 1689L, 2143L, 1793L, 2027L, 2592L, 2584L, NA), Sep = c(330L, 703L, 745L, 1176L, 947L, 894L, 1351L, 1491L, 1439L, 1864L, 1646L, 1784L, 1365L, 2714L, 1868L, 2554L, NA), Oct = c(219L, 805L, 691L, 1197L, 900L, 1129L, 1708L, 1669L, 1592L, 2133L, 1832L, 1712L, 1427L, 2983L, 2320L, 2434L, NA ), Nov = c(472L, 752L, 773L, 911L, 853L, 733L, 1720L, 1490L, 1636L, 1663L, 1545L, 1786L, 1518L, 2848L, 2112L, 1984L, NA ), Dec = c(517L, 666L, 765L, 844L, 677L, 492L, 1595L, 1298L, 1424L, 1520L, 1445L, 2148L, 1524L, 2374L, 1948L, 1921L, NA )), .Names = c(Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec), class = data.frame, row.names = c(1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 )) ## s-news traffic s - structure(c(NA, 210, 264, 246, 230, 189, 197, 174, 109, 51, 48, 5, 273, 173, 313, 232, 255, 179, 230, 161, 87, 59, 63, NA, 378, 313, 285, 252, 242, 218, 257, 193, 99, 74, 58, NA, 293, 300, 264, 300, 228, 196, 151, 182, 123, 48, 47, NA, 330, 334, 306, 331, 219, 189, 164, 174, 107, 46, 31, NA, 243, 254, 247, 282, 248, 217, 175, 109, 96, 34, 27, NA, 219, 284, 245, 258, 230, 221, 154, 159, 84, 47, 40, NA, 209, 270, 302, 260, 207, 187, 187, 144, 97, 39, 28, NA, 191, 300, 204, 260, 221, 186, 195, 107, 68, 35, 41, NA, 241, 253, 251, 229, 280, 295, 150, 98, 73, 70, 30, NA, 181, 300, 261, 232, 228, 197, 176, 82, 53, 56, 27, NA, 141, 194, 176, 194, 177, 142, 176, 84, 20, 41, 36, NA), .Dim = c(12L, 12L), .Dimnames = list(c(1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009), c(Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec))) r - structure(c(NA, 135, 226, 205, 558, 884, 1017, 1116, 1746, 2075, 1714, 2490, 462, NA, 79, 145, 355, 583, 697, 1137, 1580, 1724, 1920, 1907, 2583, NA, NA, 114, 195, 377, 651, 880, 1203, 1946, 1703, 2270, 2191, 2740, NA, 92, 101, 189, 377, 470, 965, 1488, 1657, 2057, 1818, 2145, 2487, NA, 36, 90, 161, 504, 552, 1057, 1268, 1561, 1887, 2029, 2210, 2517, NA, 47, 105, 186, 418, 550, 926, 1319, 1714, 2056, 1811, 2307, 2774, NA, 41, 110, 184, 293, 615, 918, 1344, 1618, 1872, 1785, 2138, 3268, NA, 37, 64, 148, 356, 562, 824, 1210, 1493, 1777, 1898, 2241, 2813, NA, 40, 94, 203, 434, 678, 705, 1443, 1534, 1709, 1902, 2028, 2990, NA, 76, 96, 231, 418, 657, 1055, 1567, 1712, 1810, 2328, 2708, 3037, NA, 61, 184, 318, 433, 825, 1038, 1605, 1895, 1907, 2127, 2594, 2730, NA, 57, 105, 221, 422, 530, 742, 1158, 1481, 1508, 1450, 2028, 2399, NA), .Dim = c(13L, 12L), .Dimnames = list(c(1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009), c(Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec))) library(reshape) sas - melt(as.matrix(sas), na.rm = TRUE) r - melt(r, na.rm = TRUE) s - melt(s, na.rm = TRUE) names(r) - names(s) - names(sas) - c(year, month, count) sas$software - sas s$software - s r$software - r all - rbind(sas, s, r) all$date - with(all, as.Date(paste(year, month, 15, sep = -), %Y-%b-%d)) library(ggplot2) qplot(date, count, data = all, geom = line, colour = software) + geom_smooth(se = F, size = 1) last_plot() + scale_y_log10(breaks = 10^(1:3), labels = 10^(1:3)) yearly - ddply(all, .(year, software), function(df) c(count = sum(df$count))) qplot(year, count, data = yearly, geom = line, colour = software) Hadley, You might want to remove the 2009 data from each of the three lists given that the January data is not yet complete. The result of including the January 2009 data in your plots is that the growth trajectory for the smoothed curves for SAS-L and R-Help appear to be leveling or even declining, when at least for R-Help, that is not the case. The S-News curve is not affected significantly, given the already declining counts. The effect of the 2009 data is most noticeable in the
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
You might want to remove the 2009 data from each of the three lists given that the January data is not yet complete. The result of including the January 2009 data in your plots is that the growth trajectory for the smoothed curves for SAS-L and R-Help appear to be leveling or even declining, when at least for R-Help, that is not the case. The S-News curve is not affected significantly, given the already declining counts. The effect of the 2009 data is most noticeable in the log scale plot. Thus: all - subset(all, year 2009) Good point - thanks for the fix! Hadley -- http://had.co.nz/ __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
Note that the mts object I posted already had Jan 2009 removed and also had the NA rows removed. On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:58 PM, hadley wickham h.wick...@gmail.com wrote: You might want to remove the 2009 data from each of the three lists given that the January data is not yet complete. The result of including the January 2009 data in your plots is that the growth trajectory for the smoothed curves for SAS-L and R-Help appear to be leveling or even declining, when at least for R-Help, that is not the case. The S-News curve is not affected significantly, given the already declining counts. The effect of the 2009 data is most noticeable in the log scale plot. Thus: all - subset(all, year 2009) Good point - thanks for the fix! Hadley -- http://had.co.nz/ __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On 7 January 2009 at 18:24, Gabor Grothendieck wrote: | By running the code below we see that the: | - sum of the three seems to be rising at a constant rate | - S is declining | - SAS and R are rising | - R is rising the fastest through its completed its phase | of highest growth which ended around 2004 I wonder whether we need to account for traffic on all the additional r-sig-* mailing lists ? Of the handful that I follow, some seem to have taken traffic from r-help. This could account for (at least parts of) the apparent traffic growth slowdown since 2004 as many of these added lists appeared only in the last few years. Dirk -- Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions. __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
Re: [R] R in the NY Times
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 10:26 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel e...@debian.org wrote: On 7 January 2009 at 18:24, Gabor Grothendieck wrote: | By running the code below we see that the: | - sum of the three seems to be rising at a constant rate | - S is declining | - SAS and R are rising | - R is rising the fastest through its completed its phase | of highest growth which ended around 2004 I wonder whether we need to account for traffic on all the additional r-sig-* mailing lists ? Of the handful that I follow, some seem to have taken traffic from r-help. This could account for (at least parts of) the apparent traffic growth slowdown since 2004 as many of these added lists appeared only in the last few years. Good observation. It would be interesting to combine the data from all the lists to see what the effect is. __ R-help@r-project.org 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.
