[R] question from a beginner

[Andrew Perrin]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002 hzi at uol.com.br wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 06:49:00PM -0500, Ben Bolker wrote:
> > 
> >   No, not really.
> >   There are some facilities if you want to *design* GUIs for other people
> > to use, e.g. the Tcl/Tk extensions or Rweb (www.math.montana.edu/Rweb/),
> > but nothing where you can start from scratch with an arbitrary set of
> > data.  R is much more process-oriented: if you know what you want to do
> > (linear regression, ANOVA, etc.), it should be fairly easy to find the
> > commands that do what you want.  S-PLUS has GUI facilities, although I
> > haven't tried them.  I think there is a fairly strong philosophy among
> > most R developers that the "right" way to do things is to learn some of
> > the underlying foundations so that you can really understand what you are
> > doing.  It is easier to go wrong with GUIs -- although there are lots of
> > confounding factors, and GUIs can be designed in better or worse ways.
> >
> 
> 	As true as it what you've said may be, one sometimes wishes for a little GUI
> functionality.
> 	If one __were__ to develop (say something with Tk), or any other contribution
> in that sense, how could one distribute it)?
> 	Little tedious things like summary and histograms...
> 
> 	Cheers,
> 
> 	Henry L
> 
> 


Distribution doesn't seem hard -- tar it up and stick it on a website
somewhere. The real problem is developing it in such a way that it's
useful but doesn't gloss over too much of the underlying mathematics.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin at unc.edu - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
 Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
      269 Hamilton Hall, CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA



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