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

[Peter Kleiweg]

James Wettenhall schreef op de 21e dag van de wijnmaand van het jaar 2005:
 
> We may have to agree to disagree about some things, but I hope 
> this has made my point of view a little clearer.

Actually, your elaborate response makes much sense to me. I 
understand now that it is not just about replacing the command 
line with a GUI. It is not like LaTeX versus Word (i.e. good 
versus bad), but about organising and streamlining tasks, doing 
"higher level" things. At least, that is what I think it is.

This is a topic I have been struggling with for quite some time. 
For years, I have been working on software for dialectometrics 
and cartography. At the beginning, just for doing research at 
our institute. But soon, it developed into something people from 
other institutes can use. A large set of command line programs, 
manual pages, an R interface, and quite an extensive tutorial 
with example material.

My employer urged me to add some sort of GUI. It would make more 
people willing to try using the software. I resisted the idea of 
a GUI. For one thing, I work on Linux but the GUI should be used 
on Windows. (Java is too bothersome. Smalltalk too clumsy. And I 
didn't know about Python yet.) But the main problem was: I had 
no idea what a GUI should look like, what it was supposed to do. 
It took me quite some time, working with my own software, before 
I was able to look at it from a distance. The software is just a 
toolkit. I didn't want a Graphical Toolkit. What I wanted was 
something like a Graphical Project Manager, something task 
oriented, with and interactive help system that guides the user 
through the work.

It is still fresh. I haven't had any responses on people using 
the GUI, so I don't know yet if this is what people helps. What 
I still think as one of the biggest obstacles for using my 
software is not cured by the GUI. You still need to select and 
prepare the data. If you want maps, you have to provide map 
data, in a format the software understands.

This GUI I built is quite specific. It assumes a quite narrow 
purpose (though parts of the software can be used independently 
for quite other purposes): you start with a set of dialect data, 
you do some calculations on that data to make estimates of 
differences between dialects, and you visualise these dialect 
differences on a geographic map.

I still don't see anything like that for R. A general GUI for R? 
What are the "higher level task" you use R for? It only makes 
sense to me if you want to use R in a specific field, such as in 
Bioconductor. You build a GUI to that specific higher level 
application of R.

Or does anyone want to transform R into something like a 
spreadsheet program? There are people making a GUI for LaTeX to 
make it look like Word, a WYSIWYG, but to me that seems like a 
very silly thing to do.

For those interested, here is my software:

    http://www.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/L04/

And the GUI is here:

    http://www.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/L04/pyL04/

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