[R] GUI's for teaching

[David Lucy]

Rohan,

You are right - we have had this discussion before. I think the last
time I participated in it we had reached the stage where the only GUI to
R would be on the lines of the old SPSS `scratch pad' affair, which was
more just a guide to the SPSS functions, but no more.

I think the problem is that most users of R tend to be in research, or
have a requirement for flexability from a suitably heavyweight language.
Few using R are unfamilier with programming at some level and really for
these people there is no need to have anything other than the command
interpreter. One only has to look at what has happenned to Splus to see
the deletarious effects of encroaching gooiness - I'm fine with the unix
command line version of Splus, but get utterly lost with the Windows
version.

Having said that R is flexible enough for people to write their own GUI
type applications for specific functions. I have done it myself for the
forensic scientists who need simple to operate sample size estimation
functions (see - http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~dlucy/software.html). These
operate in both Windows and Unix R environments from icons on the
desktop - they're not perfect, but do perform adequately.

Rather than some generalised GU interface to R you would probably be
better off writing a specific package to do exactly what you want it to
do - the examples above took about 2 weeks each and a week or so to get
familiar enough with Tcl to get by.

I can only speak for myself, but would urge the R developers not to go
any further down the GUI path than they have already done with the
Windows version to avoid the user base becomming split into GUI people
and command interpreter people who view R in essentially different ways.


Regards,

David.


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**  Dr. David Lucy                                                  **
**  Department of Mathematics and Statistics                        **
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**  Dr. David Lucy                                                  **
**  Department of Mathematics                                       **
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