[R] GUI's for teaching

[Morten H Pedersen]

As a beginner I thought - and still think - the naming conventions were a bit to messy and confusing. The '.' period in names is disturbing, making one think of an operater (like in C/C++). Especially since it is not used consequently. Function names are very different - sometimes very short like c() and sometimes long: test.wilcox(). I know it would be very hard to change due to backward compability, but naming conventions like capital letters for each word in names, no delimiters is much easier to use like:

 TestWilcox  TestT  Concat  

and maybe an official decision on function / variable distinction by naming conventions

Sincerely,
Morten H Pedersen
mhp at dadlnet.dk

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marc Feldesman" <feldesmanm at pdx.edu>
To: "Michael Camann" <mac24 at humboldt.edu>; "Jonathan Baron" <baron at cattell.psych.upenn.edu>
Cc: "R Help" <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2002 6:56 PM
Subject: SPAM - Re: [R] GUI's for teaching


> I used R for a Data Analysis Course last year.  The class had both advanced 
> undergraduates and graduates.  All students had already taken a basic 
> statistics course taught by our statistics faculty in which Minitab was the 
> software.  I had to work really hard to get students to understand the R/S 
> paradigm -- and some never did grasp it -- but most eventually grasped the 
> essence of what they needed.  I had students buying MASS3 and Spector, and 
> gave them pdf copies of John Maindonald's notes, my own notes, Emmanuel 
> Paridis' "R for Beginners".  Despite a rocky start, the real story is that 
> 5 students from that class have used or are using R to complete Bachelor's 
> Honor Theses or Master's Theses.  I've used SPSS, SAS, and SYSTAT to teach 
> the class before and have never had this kind of "return rate".
> 
> Perforce, the students using R/S also learned more about statistics, 
> programming, and data management than any group of students using the Point 
> and Click software.
> 
> It takes much more effort to teach with R than with "standard" Windows 
> software, but the effort pays off for both the student and the instructor 
> in the long run.
> 
>   
> 
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