[R] R vs. Splus in Pharma/Devices Industry

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

Cody_Hamilton at Edwards.com wrote:
> Following up to some extent on Friday's discussion regarding the
> 'validation' of R, could I ask the list group's opinion on possible
> advantages of R over Splus from a pharma/devices perspective?  I wish to
> exclude the obvious price difference, which doesn’t seem to carry as much
> weight as I would have thought.  Besides, I have noticed many former Splus
> users gravitating towards R, and I suspect that the reasons are not purely
> economic.
> 
> I can think of a few advantages of Splus:
> 1. SeqTrial (of course that means more $)
> 2. Tech support
> 3. The warm fuzzies that management seems to get from proprietary software
> 
> I can also think of a few advantages of R:
> 1. Based on my personal experiences, simulations requiring a lot of looping
> seem to run faster.
> 2. R interfaces with BUGS, for example through BRUGS.
> 3. The wonderful help list!
> 
> As always, I am speaking for myself and not necessarily for Edwards
> Lifesciences.
> 
> Regards,
>    -Cody
> 
> Cody Hamilton, PhD
> Edwards Lifesciences
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

A big one for us is plotmath (for clinical trial reports we put a lot of 
greek letters and subscripts on plots), and later we will consider 
migrating a lot of our stuff to the ggplot package which I don't think 
is available in S-Plus.  Lexical scoping is another advantage of R as is 
the ability to reference files on the internet.

Frank

> 
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-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University