[R] Is there a canonical way to pronounce CRAN?

[peter dalgaard]

As far as I remember, "cranberries" as a parallel to "Java beans" was part of the original CRAN concept in 1997. (This can possibly be dug out from the mailing list archives; should be around March/April 1997.) But even within R Core the pronunciaton varies, possibly even within R Core members. I think Kurt says "Krahn", Uwe "C-ran", and I likely parrot whichever one I am talking to.

- Peter D.

> On 4 May 2022, at 17:56 , Achim Zeileis <Achim.Zeileis using uibk.ac.at> wrote:
> 
> My personal impression is that in the early days of CRAN the pronouncation as in "C-Ran" was more common but this has shifted towards "Cran" over the years.
> 
> CRAN was named in the same style as CPAN for Perl and CTAN for TeX (as others have pointed out in this thread already). Many R users and developers were also active in other free software communities and were familiar with CPAN and CTAN as well. Hence "C-Ran" was natural.
> 
> But because - unlike the other abbreviations - CRAN can be pronounced as "Cran" it was attractive for wordplays like Cranberries (https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries/), Crantastic (https://github.com/hadley/crantastic), fortunes::fortune("Yes we CRAN!"), etc. Also, I would guess that the vast majority of today's R users (and possibly also developers) is not familiar with CPAN or CTAN anymore. Hence "Cran" is more natural for most of them.
> 
> And given that even the founders of CRAN sometimes pronounce it in one and sometimes in the other way, I think it is fair to use both pronouncations.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Achim
> 
> 
> On Wed, 4 May 2022, Roland Rau via R-help wrote:
> 
>> Dear all,
>> 
>> I talked with colleagues this morning and we realized that some people (=me) pronounce CRAN like the German word "Kran" (probably pronounced like "cruhn" in English -- if it was a word).
>> My colleague pronounced it as "Sea-Ran" or "Sea-Run". The colleague was a student and has worked at the same institution as an R Core Developer and heard it from him personally.
>> 
>> So now I am puzzled. Have I been wrong about 43% of my life? ;-)
>> 
>> Honestly: Is there a unique way how the core developers prounounce CRAN?
>> 
>> Not an urgent question at all but maybe interesting to many of us.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Roland
>> 
>> --
>> This mail has been sent through the MPI for Demographic ...{{dropped:2}}
>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>> 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 using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> 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.

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd.mes using cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd using gmail.com