[R] style question: returning multiple arguments - structure orlist

[fharrell@virginia.edu]

Jonathan,

That makes a good deal of sense.  I look forward to 
future postings of your experiences this fall.

One thing that I have learned is a mistake is to try
to "ease" the students into S by having them
spend the first 2-3 weeks of the course using only
the S-Plus graphical user interface.  From now on I'm going
directly to the command line.

Frank


Jonathan Baron wrote:
> 
> >From owner-r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch  Sun Jul 29 09:36:10 2001
> >I too am troubled by the computer illiteracy of students
> >these days.  As an experiment this summer I am having
> >incoming students who don't know at least one computer
> >language work through the book "Beginning Programming
> >for Dummies" by Wallace Wang.
> 
> This sounds like a good book, but I want to make a pedagogical
> point.  Although transfer of learning does occur, the last 100
> years of research have tended to support the view that it is
> incomplete and that it also works in both directions.  In my
> youth, they tried to get me to learn Latin because it would "make
> French easier."  (I refused, and learned German.)  The fact is
> that learning French would make Latin easier, just as much as the
> reverse.  Thus, if the target is S/R, teach S/R first.  It will
> help students learn other languages just as much as the reverse.
> 
> Of course, the availability of good teaching materials is an
> issue.  I plan to work on this in the fall, when I force the
> students in our introductory graduate methods class to learn R,
> both as a beginning cure for computer illiteracy and as a useful
> tool in its own right - more useful for the average psychology
> researcher, I think, than C or anything else.
> 
> Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
> Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
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-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr              Prof. of Biostatistics & Statistics
Div. of Biostatistics & Epidem. Dept. of Health Evaluation Sciences
U. Virginia School of Medicine  http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat
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