[R] Pros and Cons of R

[Monica Pisica]

Hi,

I am doing a very informal presentation for my office about R capabilities to deal with and analyze spatial data, display data and maps, and connections with GIS. I've used in my presentation info from the CRAN, the spatial Task view, and the more striking graphics examples from http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/thumbs.php and NCEAS http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/scicomp/GISSeminar/UseCases/MapProdWithRGraphics/OneMapProdWithRGraphics.html together with examples of my own work.

I am finishing with pros and cons about R and I am wondering if you can come up with other examples, or comments. Here they are:

Pros:

- R is a programming environment well suited for statistical analysis.
- R is open source and cross platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).
- Fortran, C (C++), and Python wrappers are in place.
- Deals well with spatial data, has a robust graphical interface and has an active user group list / forum.
- External packages for R are almost daily increasing, most of them based on published up-to-date books and peer-reviewed articles.
- R related books – quite a few ….

Cons:

- R has a very steep learning curve.
- There is no perfect “beginner” book.
- Experience with other programming languages is a plus / minus.
- You can save scripts, but not *.exe.
- It is updated several times a year (good) but there are no up-grades.
- It seems that it is hard to install correctly under Linux.
- Everything you want to do is a command line, minimal GUI.
- Memory management problems (depends on your OS), especially when displaying big images at high resolution or working with huge matrices (hundreds of Mb).

Also i am wondering if R works under 64 bit computers and if it takes advantage of it.

Thanks,

Monica

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