[R] Introductory Resources

[Spencer Graves]

	  I've been using S-Plus almost daily for roughly 7 years and testing R 
daily for the past 4 months.  In my opinion, roughly 90% of the 
differences I've seen are in R's favor, e.g., the "log" options in the 
probability functions.

	  I think the future lies with R, because I guessing that much of the 
most advanced algorithm development must be in R:  I can modify an R 
function and give it to the world;  if others find my modification 
useful, I get recognized for having made a contribution to science and 
humanity.  If I do that with an S-Plus function, I'm a thief, because 
I've stolen Insightful's intellectual property.

	  In brief, I believe that R is already superior to S-Plus, and the 
difference is increasing.  I'm telling my collaborators who use S-Plus 
that our new software development should be tested in both R and S-Plus 
so we can switch whenever we need to.

Hope this helps.
Spencer Graves
p.s.  You'll find much more discussion of this by searching the r-news 
archives, "http://www.r-project.org/" -> Search -> "R Search Site".

RBaskin at ahrq.gov wrote:
>>I am interested in R as an alternative for a statistical tool 
>>at our firm.
> 
> Ditto...
> 
> I have recently moved to this agency from a company where I had access to
> Splus.  There is also a coworker here who had used Splus at a previous
> employer.  We both would like some access to the S language.  We are
> considering either begging loud and long to try to get the agency to
> purchase two copies of Splus or trying to convert to R.  This is not an easy
> decision under the circumstances and purchasing Splus will mean giving up
> something else.  On the other hand I have never used R before and I fear the
> learning curve for using R plus possibly ESS.
> 
> There are a few things I am trying to determine before I really decide what
> to do.  I have been trying to convert some of my old Splus script files at
> home to run under R 1.7.0.  Small (less than 50 lines or so) script files
> that I have tested run exactly as before.  I tried to run one large
> simulation and it took about a week of screaming hell to get the error
> messages out (well all but one error message anyway).
> 
> 
> 1) I want a test suite for R.  I noted in the messages (Date: Mon Feb 24
> 2003 - 22:18:03 EST) that Prof Ripley wrote "Well, R itself has lots of
> tests in its test suite (see directory tests in the sources) packages..."
> but I was too stupid to find them.  
> Q1: Can someone provide directions to this test suite that even an idiot can
> follow?
> 
> 
> 2) Most of the problems I ran into had to do with missing values (in effect
> I have ragged arrays).  One silly example is that I had made use of which.na
> 'which' apparently is not defined in R 1.7.0.  There are multiple
> workarounds such as simply defining a function which.na but of course it
> would be untested and you can loop back to 1).  The problem in my script
> files is the same I had in Splus.  I want the defaults on all of the
> functions (such as mean, median, etc.) I am using to be reset GLOBALLY so
> that the default is to ignore missing values or not. 
> Q2: Can the missing defaults be set globally for all functions.  In other
> words, I want the default for how to treat NAs in all functions to be set at
> startup.
> 
> 
> 3)  What I really want to do is pass a function name and extra arguments to
> another function.  For example, in Splus, you can pass a function such as
> median to the bootstrap function.  The bootstrap function says that you can
> pass arguments to the median function through the bootstrap function but
> unfortunately I could never make this work.  This functionality would
> probably solve most of my NA problems if I could make it work.  (I don't
> seem to be able to properly use the ellipses:)
> Pseudo-Example: The Splus bootstrap can be called as
> Bootstrap(variable-name, median, sampler=sample-function, na.rm=T)
> But I never figured out how to pass the na.rm=T as an argument to median so
> that the function being bootstrapped is median(variable-name, na.rm=T).
> Q3: Is there some way in R to pass alternative arguments through a function
> to another?
> 
> 4)    Any general thoughts on Splus versus R that you are willing to share?
> 
> 
> This is way too much blithering for one day but thanks in advance for any
> thoughts.
> 
> Bob Baskin
> All the usual disclaimers that my statements don't represent the agency etc.
> etc.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Marc Schwartz [mailto:mschwartz at medanalytics.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 1:19 PM
> To: 'Fohr, Marc [AM]'; 'R-help at lists.R-project.org'
> Subject: RE: [R] Introductory Resources
> 
> 
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
>>[mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Fohr, Marc
> 
> [AM]
> 
>>Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 11:46 AM
>>To: 'R-help at lists.R-project.org'
>>Subject: [R] (no subject)
>>
>>
>>Hello,
>>
>>I am interested in R as an alternative for a statistical tool 
>>at our firm. I
>>do know RATS an SPSS but not S+. As I read that R is close to 
>>S+, I would
>>like to know if you could recommend me any books as an 
>>introduction to S+ or
>>R.
>>
>>Best regards
>>
>>Marc
> 
> 
> 
> Marc,
> 
> Reviewing R FAQs 2.7 and 3.x on the main R site would be a good place
> to start. The former lists books and other documents (some online)
> that serve as excellent introductions, while the latter helps to
> differentiate R and S/S+.
> 
> Spending some time with those references and the R FAQs will serve as
> a good foundation, with keyword searches of the R-help list archive
> serving as an additional strong resource.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> Another Marc
> 
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