[R] Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata...

[Patrick Burns]

I'll expand my statement slightly.

Yes, Peter, you are the archetypical
stuffy professor.  The truth hurts.

By any reasonable metric that I've
thought of my company name is at least
one-third "statistics", from which a
common (and I think correct) inference
would be that I'm not anti-statistics.


There are two aspects of why I think
that R should not be called a statistical
program: marketing and reality.

Marketing

Identifying with the most dreaded experience
in university is not so good for "sales".
(Reducing stuffiness might reduce the root
problem here.)

Reality

R really is used for more than statistics.
Almost all of my use of R is outside the
realm of statistics.  Maybe the field of
statistics should have claim on a lot of
that, but as of now that isn't the case.

A Fusion

R's real competition is not SAS or SPSS, but
Excel.  As Brian has pointed out before,
the vast majority of statistics is actually
done in Excel.  Is Excel a statistics program?
I don't think many people think that -- neither
statisticians nor non-statisticians.

Pat


On 21/06/2010 10:32, Joris Meys wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Patrick Burns
> <pburns at pburns.seanet.com>  wrote:
>>
>> (Statistics is what stuffy professors
>> do, I just look at my data and try to
>> figure out what it means.)
>
> Often those stuffy professors have a reason to do so. When they want
> an objective view on the data for example, or an objective measure of
> the significance of a hypothesis. But you're right, who cares about
> objectiveness these days? It doesn't sell you a paper, does it?
>
> Cheers
> Joris
>
>

-- 
Patrick Burns
pburns at pburns.seanet.com
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of 'Some hints for the R beginner'
and 'The R Inferno')