[Rd] [R-gui] R GUI considerations (was: R, Wine, and multi-threadedness)

[Peter Kleiweg]

James Wettenhall schreef op de 20e dag van de wijnmaand van het jaar 2005:

[...]
> providing a GUI to them, getting started in R is less 
> intimidating for them, so then we can hopefully spend less 
> time doing mundane numerical computing tasks for our 
> collaborators and have more time to do our own serious 
> research.  And we can even publish our work on developing GUIs 
> which we have - just a short article in Bioinformatics OUP so 
> far - and John Fox has published a full-length article on 
> Rcmdr in the Journal of Statistical Software - great stuff!
> 
> Does that make sense?

To me, it does not make sense. When I have to work with 
something like Word, I am intimidated by lots of buttons with 
cryptic icons, with menus and submenus I can't make heads or 
tails of, the program doing weird things with my text I don't 
understand. A simple, friendly prompt is much more inviting. 
Give me a well-organised documentation, and let me do my thing.

A GUI fits in a big-is-better marketing strategy. The more 
intimidating a GUI looks, the better. As a user, I always feel a 
prisoner of such monstrosities. Hundreds of options, but I 
cannot find the ones I actually need, with no possibility to use 
other software tools as auxiliaries.

I find, the biggest problems with operating on large and complex 
sets of data (like you do in R), are things like digitisation of 
the data, preparation, transformation, selection. You usually 
have to do quite some work on the data before you have something 
R can handle. This preparation is best done with the tools you 
feel comfortable with, a simple editor, shell scripts, Perl, 
make, etc. Once you have your data prepared, invoking another 
command through the command line is a small step. You can go 
forward and backward, doing data preparation and processing the 
prepared data with something like R, iteratively. Look at GRASS 
as an excellent example.

You want all the preprocessing done in a GUI? I don't see how 
that is possible in a way that makes sense. How do you tell the 
GUI what your raw data looks like? How do you tell it to prepare 
the data for processing by R? Does the user have to learn the 
GUI's own scripting language and filters?

If you want users to be productive, you have to give them 
something they can easily incorporate within the tools they use 
on a daily basis. No big applications with everything locked in, 
but a set of programs or commands that do specific tasks, with 
an easy to understand input and output. You need something that 
works in an open environment, so the user can use existing 
skills. With a GUI that does "everything", the user has to learn 
from scratch all the things that make "everything" happen.

-- 
Peter Kleiweg
http://www.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/