[R-gui] Re: [R] Feedback about SciViews?

[Zed Shaw]

Martin,

I hate to rain on your parade, but being someone who has had to 
struggle with R for the last three years, I have to disagree with you 
here.  I know you really like R, and I'm sure it is possible to produce 
an interface with it, but "possible" is completely different from 
"reasonable" when it comes to development.  Statements like your's are 
basically what caused people like myself to look outside R for their 
development needs.  Rather than saying, "Hey, what are we doing wrong?" 
  You wold rather ignore the problem and say, "Idiots.  They should use 
R for development."

I think that maybe you should listen to what people have to say about 
their experience trying to write these GUIs.  Maybe if you started to 
hear things like what Philippe and myself continue to complain about, 
and started to fix them, then you might find that even your own 
development projects improve.  Basically, start listening to your users 
more and don't assume that you can impose your way of doing things on 
other people.  A classic example is how the R code insists on checking 
to see it is connected to a pty, and if not it aborts on any errors.  
Or that R uses jumps to maintain the event loop, but doesn't provide a 
convenient way to override this behavior.  Simple things like this 
cause others tons of headaches, but are so simple to fix.

I won't go into specific complaints about R as a large scale 
development language as I don't think anyone working on R is interested 
in hearing them (that's called "industrial autism" BTW).  All I can say 
is, if you want people to use R to write their programs, maybe you 
should make R behave more like every other scripting language on the 
planet.  Take a look at how Python, Perl, Lua, Ruby, Tcl, Java, and 
others do things.  Try to find out from people what features of these 
languages they like and then try to emulate those features.  I think if 
you just adopted a few really simple features from these languages, 
you'd improve R tremendously.

Anyway, enjoy your day.

Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/


On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, at 02:31 AM, Martin Maechler wrote:

>
> R for Windows already comes with a (simple) GUI.
> Many of the R developers would rather think mostly about GUI
> efforts that are platform INDEPENDENT, such as the standard Tcl/Tk
> package (try "library(tcltk)" and the demos from "demo(package =
> "tcltk")" in R), and the RGtk (http://www.omegahat.org/RGtk/) one.
>
> For that reason, in the Bioconductor project 
> (http://www.bioconductor.org),
> the  "tkWidgets" package has been developed (built on top of R's
> standard "tcltk" package -- which from 1.7.0 on does not need
> extra efforts for installation on Windows).
>
> Excuse that this sounds a bit negative, but platform independence
> is one of the strengths of R.