[R] Making a case for using R in Academia

[Charilaos Skiadas]

Thank you all for your responses both on and off the list, and  
especially to Marc for the following link, it's exactly the sort of  
thing I was looking for. I tried searching the archives myself, but  
the right search words were escaping me as well. This also led me to  
the tutorials on the "Burns Statistics" website, which had a lot of  
useful information as well

I suppose one of the concerns in our case is whether people might be  
"locked out" so to speak in terms of being able to submit to certain  
journals or work with people who use one of these packages instead.  
Have any of you had any problems in that direction?

I would particularly like to hear from people who were not "hard-core  
programmers" before taking up R, so perhaps had originally some  
difficulties with it. How hard was it, and how quickly did it start  
paying off? Our main stumbling block I feel would be to get our  
colleagues to switch to using R, at least for their teaching, and  
most of them would probably have never really seen a programming  
language before.

Thanks again for all your feedback, and looking forward to any other  
comments you have.

Charilaos Skiadas
Department of Mathematics
Hanover College
P.O.Box 108
Hanover, IN 47243

On Nov 8, 2006, at 6:16 PM, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> There are such discussions sprinkled over the last few years in the
> r-help archives that you might want to review. There is a lengthy one
> here:
>
> http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02a/archive/35616.html
>
> and there are others, though the proper key words seem to be  
> escaping me
> at the moment.
>
> Also, there are at least two articles in R News that you might find of
> interest:
>
> Marc Schwartz. The decision to use R. R News, 4(1):2-5, June 2004.
>
> Bill Pikounis and Andy Liaw. The value of R for preclinical
> statisticians. R News, 5(1):44-47, May 2005.