[R] re: GUI's for teaching

[Stuart Leask]

> BTW, are GUIs the best way to teach stats? I recommend newcomers to R to
> save their command lines in a text file in order to able to source() them
> later. Quite often you need to re-do an analysis, because you have new
> data, you want to change a parameter, fit new models, ...
>
> Emmanuel Paradis

Yes yes yes... the time I've spent (read 'wasted') looking over students'
shoulders while they umm ("click!") & ahh ("click!") their way through what
they _thought_ they did last week  in SPSS, which 'didn't work', has
convinced me that GUIs are a lousy way to 'debug' someone else's faulty
analysis... not to mention the time I've saved returning to an R script 6
months on, which then 'talks' me through how I'd got to where I'd got to...

Stuart

Dr Stuart Leask MA MRCPsych, Clinical Lecturer in Psychiatry
University of Nottingham Dept of Psychiatry, Duncan Macmillan House
Porchester Road, Nottingham. NG3 6AA. UK
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/psychiatry/staff/sjl.html

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