[R] Re: The hidden costs of GPL software?

2004-11-19 Thread Siddique, Amer 
my quick thought:
R is a programming language and shouldn't be wrapped up in a GUI to serve
the interests of those too complacent to learn to leverage its power. 

and to echo others: I feel an IDE approach with, say, a code editor and a
hyperlinked help system with a richer set of examples is sufficient. we
already have the former. cheers

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[R] Re: The hidden costs of GPL software?

2004-11-18 Thread Tiago R Magalhaes 
My background:
I am a biologist coming to R via Bioconductor. I have no computer 
background in computer sciences and only basic undergraduate training 
level in statistics.

I have used R with great pleasure and great pains. The most difficult 
thing is to know what functions to use - sometimes I know that one 
function is most likely available, but there's really no easy way to 
get it (yes, even going to the archives and reading the help files). 
I feel that more examples in the help files would definitely be a 
good way to fully understand the potencial of the functions. I know 
how difficult this is to do and how much of a time sink it must be.

One thing I defeinitely think would be a great improvement is to have 
a beefed up Object Explorer as Splus does. I think it's the great 
advantage of Splus when compared to R is to have much easier access 
to what type of object, col names, classes and so on there are. And 
how much easier it is to change all these attributes in Splus. I 
think R 2.0 in Mac did a lot to improve this, but I think that for 
someone that very frequently needs to know whether the object created 
turned out to be a vector or a list, the easy access to objects is 
very, very, very important and would be a great improvement in the 
ease of use of R.

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RE: [R] Re: The hidden costs of GPL software?

2004-11-18 Thread Arne.Muller 
[...]
 I am a biologist coming to R via Bioconductor. I have no computer 
 background in computer sciences and only basic undergraduate training 
 level in statistics.
 
 I have used R with great pleasure and great pains. The most difficult 
 thing is to know what functions to use - sometimes I know that one 
 function is most likely available, but there's really no easy way to 
 get it (yes, even going to the archives and reading the help files). 
 I feel that more examples in the help files would definitely be a 
 good way to fully understand the potencial of the functions. I know 
 how difficult this is to do and how much of a time sink it must be.

Yes, I' often have the same problem when it comes to programming in R (data 
manipulation, formatting etc ...). When thinking about a solution, I often come 
up with something slow and complicated. A positng to this list usually reveals 
a very simple solution thanks to a function that I didn't find when exploring 
help, help.search and the archives (and thanks to those who give me the hint 
;-). However, I don't know how to improve this, i.e. how to implement a more 
sophisticated help.search. Maybe the keywords in the help files or some kind of 
free text mining would help - well, maybe this is a bit over the top.

On the other hand, when it comes to the statistics (I'm a not a statistician) 
and it's minimal formatting of data etc , I think that developing an 
understanding of the stats itself is the main probelm and a GUI doesn't help 
very much in for this. Once the basic understanding is there (which one needs 
anyway, even with a GUI), the rest is not too difficult. In addition I usually 
need to script the calculations for many different datasets, and again most 
GUIs are bad in repeating tasks systematically.

I've spent quite some time with learing R (and I haven't stoped yet ;-), but 
it's devinitely worth it. As a scientists I appreciate it, and since it is a 
tool that use often, I would not exchange the command-line for any GUI.

This list and the many books and manuals (mentioned in the other postings here) 
do a pretty good job in teaching R!

kind regards,

Arne

[...]

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