[R] A comment about R:

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 1/3/06, Thomas Lumley <tlumley at u.washington.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Jan 2006, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> > One thing that is often overlooked, and hasn't yet been mentioned in
> > the thread, is how much *simpler* R can be for certain completely
> > basic tasks of practical or pedagogical relevance: Calculate a simple
> > derived statistic, confidence intervals from estimate and SE,
> > percentage points of the binomial distribution - using dbinom or from
> > the formula, take the sum of each of 10 random samples from a set of
> > numbers, etc. This is where other packages get stuck in the
> > procedure+dataset mindset.
>
> Some of these things are actually fairly straightforward in Stata. For

In fact there are some things that are very easy
to do in Stata and can be done in R but only with more difficulty.
For example, consider this introductory session in Stata:

http://www.stata.com/capabilities/session.html

Looking at the first few queries,
see how easy it is to take the top few in Stata whereas in R one would
have a complex use of order.  Its not hard in R to write a function
that would make it just as easy but its not available off the top
of one's head though RSiteSearch("sort.data.frame") will find one
if one knew what to search for.