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

[Gary Cable]

Patrick,

Thanks for your response.

Please send me any outstanding issues you have and I will relate whether
these have been addressed or not. In any event, I can assure you that I will
do my best to meet your expectations.

Gary 

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Burns [mailto:patrick at burns-stat.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 12:31 PM
To: Gary Cable
Cc: r-sig-finance at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R-sig-finance] R vs. S-PLUS



Gary Cable wrote:

>
>I don't want to detract from the success of the R language, but if I 
>were going to build solutions in a highly regulated industry that 
>expects documentation, official support and standardization -- I would 
>be inclined toward a commercial solution rather than a freeware 
>solution. This decision comes from twenty years of experience of application
development.
>  
>

The usual argument for preferring commercial software is that the commercial
software will be better written, tested, documented and supported.  The
expectation is that the free software will have many bugs, and the commercial
software will have few bugs.

Perhaps my experience is unusual, but in using S-PLUS for Windows for 4
months I found 2 serious bugs, 2 very annoying bugs and a few minor bugs.  In
2.5 years
of intense use of R I have found 4 or 5 minor bugs (almost all of which have
now been fixed).

I don't think playing the "commercial" card for S-PLUS is a good strategy
until the point that it has at least as good of quality control as R.

Patrick Burns

Burns Statistics
patrick at burns-stat.com
+44 (0)20 8525 0696
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")

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