[R] general question on Spotfire

[Terry Therneau]

John,
  Spotfire is a menu driven data exploration tool, very popular here
with biologists who found that their previous Excel based approach
doesn't cut it for large data sets.  When TIBCO wanted to expand the
tool with further quantitative features they made (I think) a bright
decision to purchase S-plus and integrate it as a back end, rather than
try to write dozens of new modules in house.  The "Splus vs R" aspect of
the list responses misses the main point, however.  

Spotfire is designed to let you nose around in a data set, quickly
plotting various aspects, zoom in on subsets (imagine a mouse based
version of the "pinch" metafor used on the iphone), etc.  It is a useful
and very well designed tool; one demo was enough to make the sale and
early growth here was explosive.  But if you already know R you can do
those graphs already, albeit quite a bit slower.  I decided not to
persue proficiency in Spotfire, but that was partly because it's Windows
based and I prefer Unix.  Also most of my work is at the
post-exploration phase, and I would have flipped back to straight R for
that anyway.

Terry Therneau