[R-sig-finance] R vs. S-PLUS

[Vadim Ogranovich]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-sig-finance-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:r-sig-finance-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of 
> Gary Cable
> Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 9:58 AM
> To: r-sig-finance at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [R-sig-finance] R vs. S-PLUS
> 
> Hello all, 
> 
> I recently joined Insightful Corporation as Product Manager 
> for Financial Solutions. I continue to hear a theme of R 
> versus S and I find it somewhat curious. R is based on S and 
> has gained a following based on a number of contributions 
> from academia and industry experts.
>  
> I prefer to view R as one evolutionary path that S has taken. 
> It has the same positives that any other GNU tool that I have 
> seen in my professional life--it is free and open for 
> everyone's use and contribution. This is both it's strength 
> and it's weakness. It is a strength because people can use it 
> as a sandbox for their ideas; it can also be a weakness 
> because it (IMO) does not represent a commercial tool that 
> provides me with stability, product support, and professional 
> services. 

Hi Gary,


Welcome to the exciting world of S.

I guess you are really new to Insightful. My more than a decade experience
is different from what you outlined above. I used to use S-Plus until about
year 2000 in a company with a decent IT budget. Most of the so called
support was coming from the S-news list. I did contact Insightful for
support on issues I could not resolve on the S-news list. In both cases the
answer was "it is too deep in the language, we can not fix it". One of those
issues was related to the introduction of the new S classes in S-Plus (they
were basically unusable at that time). A similar introduction in R has
recently gone very smoothly.
In 2000 or 2001 (R-1.3) I figured R to be a superior system to S-Plus and
had switched, some of my fellow colleagues followed the suit. I've found R
to be very stable as far as our production requirements are concerned. It
has a very predictable release schedule with a procedure for features
deprecation and removal so you are never caught by a surprise.

The support that comes from R-help list is more than enough and is 24*7*365.
The only real drawback is that the language of the replies is sometimes too
"mentoring" so sensitive people can get upset (this is where Insightful does
have an edge). Bugs get fixed almost instantly.

I am sure you know, but just in case, the "no warranty and no support"
clauses in GPL are merely to protect the software contributor against
lawsuits in some litigious environments, they are not representative of the
actual support you are going to have with the software.

Please let me know if there is anything else to product support that I
didn't address.


R is not perfect, with it I too have run into a couple of issues (related to
the speed of file reading and database connectivity) which I was not able to
resolve on R-help / R-devel list to my satisfaction. In both cases I looked
at the underlying C code, figured out the problem and wrote a couple of
packages to work around them. I had the very same problems with S-Plus too
and the only option I had back then was to use Perl for IO intensive jobs.

Now about the professional services. You can get R training, you can hire an
R consultant to write a specialized package for you, etc. I was surprised to
learn how much of a supply of such services is out there.

Sorry if you already knew all of this. I just wanted to give you some info
that you might find useful in your new role of the product manager.

Regards,
Vadim