This highlights the hurdle we face in increasing R users.  People often use
in their career software they learned in school and if we can't get the
schools to use R (even though it free) it makes it all the more difficult to
increase R usage in business and elsewhere.  If a business person says he
wants a GUI so he can do some quick analysis w/o learning programming, fine,
but if teachers and students aren't willing to put in a few hours to learn
the basics, well, that shows its going to be a hard sell.  Just my 2 cents.

On 1/23/06, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean@sciviews.org> wrote:
>
> Yes, Rcmdr is certainly the closest match. Note, however, that there are
> good reasons not to replicate SPSS style of GUI. This is because driving
> an analysis using scripts has three major advantages:
>
> - flexibility: a good, high-level programming language allows to do much
> more than even the best GUI. This is because, as soon as you have
> programmed a dialog box, you restrict possibilities to the couple of
> choices that you hardcoded in that dialog box. With R, the only limit is
> your imagination (if something does not exist, you can program it by
> yourself).
>
> - traceability: with a GUI, how do you remember all the mouse clicks
> that led you to a given analysis? On the contrary, a script is an
> accurate record of all steps.
>
> - comprehension: to construct a R script, you must understand the
> analysis. R forces to learn the logic behind *before* you can run that
> analysis. With a menu/dialog box interface, you can click everywhere and
> get results "by chance". Statistical packages with intuitive GUIs tend
> to stimulate lazyness: "here, come! Look like I am a sexy GUI! Look, I
> am sooo easy to use! And I can deliver you plenty of results, ... No,
> no, don't be afraid, you don't need to understand what you're doing.
> Just click me!".
>
> So, all GUIs proposed for R are just ways to learn in an easier way how
> to write R scripts. Even R Commander tries hard to stimulate use of R
> scripts... and you should consider a lack of a "good GUI" for R as a
> sign of quality and nothing else.
>
> Best,
>
> Philippe Grosjean
>
> Achim Zeileis wrote:
> > On Mon, 23 Jan 2006 12:44:49 -0800 (PST) pat_primate (sent by
> > Nabble.com) wrote:
> >
> >
> >>I know that this isn't really a R help question, but I am a
> >>psychology student at TRU (tru.ca) and my psych department is going
> >>to be switching statistical software in the near future.  I thought
> >>this might be a good oppertunity to advocate for open source if an
> >>acceptable option is available.  I have looked around a bit and R
> >>seems to be the most stable and mature (not to mention powerful) open
> >>source statistical program going.  The only downfall is that the
> >>school has been using spss for years and would demand a similarly
> >>user friendly GUI based statistical program to replace it.  I have
> >>looked at a few of the R guis and most of them look like they are
> >>just command line interfaces in pretty desktop windows and not really
> >>a gui like spss.  If anyone knows of any stable, userfriendly and
> >>robust guis for R that would be similar to using spss please let me
> >>know, as I would love for my school to start embracing open source
> >>software.
> >
> >
> > Have you looked at John Fox's "Rcmdr" package?
> > See
> >   http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/
> > and
> >   John Fox (2005). "The R Commander: A Basic-Statistics Graphical User
> >   Interface to R", Journal of Statistical Software, 14(9). URL
> >   http://www.jstatsoft.org/
> >
> > Also look at http://www.sciviews.org/_rgui/ for an overview of other
> > GUI projects.
> >
> > Best,
> > Z
> >
> >
> >>Thanks
> >>
> >>Pat
> >>--
> >>View this message in context:
> >>
> http://www.nabble.com/Easy%2C-Robust-and-Stable-GUI--t982193.html#a2543480
> >>Sent from the R help forum at Nabble.com.
> >>
> >>      [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >>
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