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

[Medica, Paul A]

Enough with the Tennis match.
	Gary, why don't you send e-mire a student intro copy of S-Plus
with the 1 month expiration control date imbedded and the Fin-metrics
toolkit.   And e-mire,  why don't you download a copy of the R complier
at the Ill Univ. website and run some of the shared R code.   Make your
own decision based on your specific needs.

Paul A. Medica
Product Reliability Engineering
Personal Image & Printing Group
Hewlett-Packard Co.
o: 360-212-2766
paul.medica at hp.com


-----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 Patrick
Burns
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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