Re: [MLUG] R is nice

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Robert Citek wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 12:11 AM, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
>
> > We've been using R to make some stat graphs and I just thought I'd say a few
> > words.  R is GPL and a top stat package.  All the academic statisticians are
> > using it these days.
>
> For some reason I've never been able to wrap my head around R.  Most 
> likely because I'm too used to solving problems faster in perl.  But 
> then I haven't needed to do anything more than simple stats.

I'm kinda like that too because if it is simple enough for me to do it 
with unix command-line tools, that's how I do it.  There are a lot of 
problems that can't be solved that way.  One is how to make nice graphs.


> One thing I'm not too keen on with R is that it likes to suck everything 
> into memory and then work on it.  That makes R very fast, but also means 
> you have to have a lot of RAM to work with large datasets.
>
> In fairness, it's been a few years since I've worked with R, so things 
> may have changed.

Funny coincidence -- only minutes after I sent my message about R to MLUG, 
I went to another inbox where there was an announcement that the newest 
version of R (2.7.0) had just been released.  They seem to have fixed some 
of the problems I was having with graphics.  Here's the announcement:

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-announce/2008/000841.html

This might mean that some of my suggestions for ghostscript parameters 
(e.g., -r) need to be changed, but I'm not sure on that.

Even if it takes a while to learn it, I say it is worth the time because 
it is GPL and growing fast in many ways -- user base, add-on package 
development, published R books, documentation, etc.  I think it is one of 
the big winners in the open source movement.

Mike

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