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

[Gary Cable]

Vadim,

Thanks for your response.

For the most part I understand your experiences, and have to say that since
my initial involvement with S and S-PLUS started when I worked at Bell Labs
in the early 90's and later with Mathsoft while I was at UBS Warburg in the
late 90's, I experienced the issues you have. I can only say that much of
this had to do with Mathsoft/Insightful's inability to do anything with the
base language because of ownership issues. Now that we own the S Language, we
can have a significant impact on the product line.

I also have to say that from the late 90's on through very recently, the
issues of support and commitment to the finance vertical were not as clearly
defined as they are today. We have had significant changes in management that
I believe provide us with the right mix of people and vision. I hope that I
bring my experience (not unlike yours) to bear on constant improvement and
innovation of Insightful products.

I would not have joined Insightful unless I truly believed in its people and
product potential, and I hope to work with all our customers to provide the
best products and services.

I do not want to underestimate the value of R, but rather promote the
positives of Insightful.

Regards,

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: Vadim Ogranovich [mailto:vograno at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 12:04 PM
To: Gary Cable; r-sig-finance at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: RE: [R-sig-finance] R vs. S-PLUS

 

> -----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