[R] A "rude" question
John Dougherty
jwd at surewest.net
Thu Jan 27 08:56:41 CET 2005
On Wednesday 26 January 2005 21:09, msck9 at mizzou.edu wrote:
> Dear all,
> I am beginner using R. I have a question about it. When you use it,
> since it is written by so many authors, how do you know that the
> results are trustable?(I don't want to affend anyone, also I trust
> people). But I think this should be a question.
>
Almost all software - generally all "important" software - is has numerous
authors. Windows has hundreds, perhaps thousand of coders. So too does
Unix. The big difference between open source and closed source is not in the
number of authors. Rather it is in the open availability of the code.
Arguably, if there is sufficient interest in an open source project, studies
have indicated that the code is likely to be superior to that of a comparable
closed source program. This a probability though, not a natural law.
If you are concerned about the trustworthiness of R, then perhaps the best
gauge is that some of our favorite if occasionally curmudgeonly authors on
this list are also experts in S and S-Plus, the proprietary, closed source
language of which R is also a dialect. They evidently know what they're
doing and work comfortably in both domains.
If you compare statistical results using R and Excel, there is no question
that R is superior, but that will also be true if you tested Excel against
S-Plus, or SAS, or NCSS - all proprietary programs, or any number of other
closed and open source programs designed to do statistical analyses. At the
same time just about any spreadsheet, open or closed source will also suffer
in a similar comparison.
If you want a more information about the safety of Excel I would suggest this
site:
http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html
Read the various links. Beyond this there is a broad literature available on
the risks and benefits of open and close source programs. Read it.
JWDougherty
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