[R] anti-R vitriol

[Barry Rowlingson]

A colleague is receiving some data from another person. That person 
reads the data in SAS and it takes 30s and uses 64k RAM. That person 
then tries to read the data in R and it takes 10 minutes and uses a 
gigabyte of RAM. Person then goes on to say:

   It's not that I think SAS is such great software,
   it's not.  But I really hate badly designed
   software.  R is designed by committee.  Worse,
   it's designed by a committee of statisticians.
   They tend to confuse numerical analysis with
   computer science and don't have any idea about
   software development at all.  The result is R.

   I do hope [your colleague] won't have to waste time doing
   [this analysis] in an outdated and poorly designed piece
   of software like R.

Would any of the "committee" like to respond to this? Or shall we just 
slap our collective forehead and wonder how someone could get such a view?



Barry