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

Patrick Burns pburns at pburns.seanet.com
Tue Jun 22 11:34:24 CEST 2010


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')



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