[Rd] [R-gui] R GUI considerations (was: R, Wine, and multi-threadedness)
Jeffrey J. Hallman
m1jjh00 at frb.gov
Thu Oct 20 01:25:50 CEST 2005
>>>>> "K" == Kasper Daniel Hansen <khansen at stat.Berkeley.EDU> writes:
K> On Oct 19, 2005, at 3:43 PM, Jeffrey J. Hallman wrote:
K> <SNIP>
>> Think about it. Once you have a basic math package that can handle
>> matrix
>> programming and various mathematical functions, building the various
>> statistical modeling tools on top of them is not that hard. What
>> makes S and
>> R so much better than SAS is their programmability. Smalltalk is
>> like that,
>> only better.
>>
>>
>> Jeff Hallman
K> I would claim that this quote kind of shows that you have no idea
K> what you are talking about regarding good, debugged and trustworthy
K> statistical procedures. Why do you think people are actually using R?
Kasper, a few minutes spent Googling my name should disabuse you of the notion
that I have no idea of what I'm talking about. But to answer your question:
I think people are using R because it's readily available, with a lot of good
stuff already built in.
I am not suggesting that you tell undergraduate statistics students to write
everything in Smalltalk, since the class libraries to support statistical
programming in Smalltalk do not exist yet. What I am saying is that if you
compare the languages themselves, along with their programming environments,
Smalltalk is superior to R. What it lacks are class libraries implementing
statistical procedures. I do maintain that those really are not that hard,
once you have the matrix and math libraries. My experience with S and R goes
way back to the days of blue book S version 3. S called out to C code to
handle matrix and mathmetical stuff, but used S code itself to glue it all
together in a somewhat object-oriented way.
K> I could say "well, given an environment that could interface to C,
K> building a GUI on top of that is not really that hard", but that
K> would be incredible naive as well.
Indeed it would be. But statistical programming is easier than that.
Jeff
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