[R] R in Industry

Thu Feb 8 19:47:23 CET 2007

On 2/8/2007 12:48 PM, Ben Fairbank wrote:
> To those following this thRead:
> 
> There was a thread on this topic a year or so ago on this list, in which
> contributors mentioned reasons that corporate powers-that-be were
> reluctant to commit to R as a corporate statistical platform.  (My
> favorite was "There is no one to sue if something goes wrong.")
> 
> One reason that I do not think was discussed then, nor have I seen
> discussed since, is the issue of the continuity of support.  If one
> person has contributed disproportionately heavily to the development and
> maintenance of a package, and then retires or follows other interests,
> and the package needs maintenance (perhaps as a consequence of new
> operating systems or a new version of R), is there any assurance that it
> will be available?  With a commercial package such as, say, SPSS, the
> corporate memory and continuance makes such continued maintenance
> likely, but is there such a commitment with R packages?  If my company
> came to depend heavily on a fairly obscure R package (as we are
> contemplating doing), what guarantee is there that it will be available
> next month/year/decade?  I know of none, nor would I expect one.

There's no guarantee of support, but the majority of R packages are 
licensed under the GPL, so there is a guarantee of availability of the 
source code, which means that contracting with someone expert in the 
field to provide you with support will be a possibility.  If it's an 
obscure package as you say, your company may represent a majority of 
users, and it may well be that the expert you need is already someone in 
your company, who contributed patches to the package while the original 
maintainer was still active.

If a commercial vendor were to withdraw support for a package there is 
really no hope of putting together your own support service.  You would 
have to live with the bugs and without updates, or start from scratch to 
replace it yourself.  For example, this happened to me about 10 years 
ago when Intel withdrew support for 3DR.  As it happens OpenGL is a 
better replacement, but I wasn't too happy at the time.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> As R says when it starts up, "R is free software and comes with
> ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY."
> 
> Ben Fairbank
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Patrick Burns
> Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 10:24 AM
> To: Albrecht,Dr. Stefan (AZ Private Equity Partner)
> Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] R in Industry
> 
>  From what I know Matlab is much more popular in
> fixed income than R, but R is vastly more popular in
> equities.  R seems to be making quite a lot of headway
> in finance, even in fixed income to some degree.
> 
> At least to some extent, this is probably logical behavior --
> fixed income is more mathematical, and equities is more
> statistical.
> 
> Matlab is easier to learn mainly because it has much simpler
> data structures.  However, once you are doing something
> where a complex data structure is natural, then R is going to
> be easier to use and you are likely to have a more complete
> implementation of what you want.
> 
> If speed becomes a limiting factor, then moving the heavy
> computing to C is a natural thing to do, and very easy with R.
> 
> Patrick Burns
> patrick at burns-stat.com
> +44 (0)20 8525 0696
> http://www.burns-stat.com
> (home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")
> 
> Albrecht, Dr. Stefan (AZ Private Equity Partner) wrote:
> 
>>Dear all,
>> 
>>I was reading with great interest your comments about the use of R in
>>the industry. Personally, I use R as scripting language in the
> financial
>>industry, not so much for its statistical capabilities (which are
>>great), but more for programming. I once switched from S-Plus to R,
>>because I liked R more, it had a better and easier to use documentation
>>and it is faster (especially with loops).
>> 
>>Now some colleagues of mine are (finally) eager to join me in my
>>quantitative efforts, but they feel that they are more at ease with
>>Matlab. I can understand this. Matlab has a real IDE with symbolic
>>debugger, integrated editor and profiling, etc. The help files are
>>great, very comprehensive and coherent. It also could be easier to
>>learn.
>> 
>>And, I was very astonished to realise, Matlab is very, very much faster
>>with simple "for" loops, which would speed up simulations considerably.
>>So I have trouble to argue for a use of R (which I like) instead of
>>Matlab. The price of Matlab is high, but certainly not prohibitive. R
> is
>>great and free, but maybe less comfortable to use than Matlab.
>> 
>>Finally, after all, I have the impression that in many job offerings in
>>the financial industry R is much less often mentioned than Matlab.
>> 
>>I would very much appreciate any comments on my above remarks. I know
>>there has been some discussions of R vs. Matlab on R-help, but these
>>could be somewhat out-dated, since both languages are evolving quite
>>quickly.
>> 
>>With many thanks and best regards,
>>Stefan Albrecht
>> 
>> 
>>
>>	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
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>>  
>>
> 
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> ______________________________________________
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