[R] general question on Spotfire

[Frank Harrell]

Thanks for your note Uwe.  Yes I think a lot of the needed work was related
to implementing R functions that many of us use that are not available in
S-Plus, plus what to do about plotmath.  It wasn't enough to just be able to
load the R package.  I don't think implementation of the needed R functions
in S-Plus ever happened.

Frank


Uwe Ligges-3 wrote
> 
> On 12.01.2012 17:38, Frank Harrell wrote:
>> As a slight aside, Tibco/Spotfire originally planned to provide a
>> capability
>> to load R packages into S-Plus.  This always seemed to me to be a hard
>> thing
>> to do, and if my understanding is correct, this proved to be too
>> difficult
>> to do in S-Plus, at  least for large packages such as mine.
> 
> Frank,
> 
> this dates back to the times of Insightful. They already did that and 
> had a module that allowed to load R packages. Of course, they had to be 
> S-PLUS compatible (which is not really easy any more if package authors 
> made use of R functionality that exceed the features of S-PLUS). They 
> even had hired people to make some R packages S-PLUS compatible, 
> R2WinBUGS was just one example that was available from their "CSAN" 
> repositories. (Nowadays R2WInBUGS is no longer S-PLUS compatible, since 
> the authors do not care too much and do not have S-PLUS licenses to 
> check it.)
> 
> Best,
> Uwe
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> Frank
>>
>> Terry Therneau-2 wrote
>>>
>>> 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
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
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>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
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>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>>
>>
>>
>> -----
>> Frank Harrell
>> Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University
>> --
>> View this message in context:
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>> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help@ mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@ mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 


-----
Frank Harrell
Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University
--
View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/general-question-on-Spotfire-tp4285758p4297916.html
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