The New York Times has an interesting story on the increasing use of R for data analysis within academia and industry. Several large corporates are cited as having selected R over commercial conterparts such as S and SAS.
Update: For more R news, see also Ajay Ohri’s interview with Dr Graham Williams, the author of Rattle.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Steffen // Jan 22, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Thank you for the link. I normally dont read the NY Times, so I would never have seen this without your suggestion. Another argument for upcoming discussions with managers…
One of the issues of R is its script-like-character. Hence the software developers at my company gave me strange looks when I talk about R … not without reasons, I have seen R code at universities — lets not talk about it.
I wondered…can you recommend any documents / books about professional software development with R ? Especially S4 has a lot of potential … maybe there are already some “best practices” out there…
thanks in advance
kind regards,
Steffen
2 Shane Butler // Jan 22, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Hi Steffen
What is the issue with R scripting, aren’t SAS et al. interpreted also?
BTW I am not aware of particular software development resources, but here are some general R links I use…
http://RforSASandSPSSusers.com
http://www.statmethods.net/
http://www.liaad.up.pt/~ltorgo/DataMiningWithR/
http://rattle.togaware.com/
Shane
3 Steffen // Jan 22, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Hello Shane
Thank you for the links. No, I am not coming from the SAS side …
The problem is not, that R is interpreted. The problem is, that the character of any scripting language invites you to “hack” instead of develop. The S4-classes for an example provide a way to write clean code… but I know people who refuse S4 because the coding feels … restrictive.
Compare writing code in R and in Java (e.g. for RapidMiner (which I use frequently)), then you will get a basic idea…
regards
Steffen