[R] Re: How to Describe R to Finance People

ivo welch
2004-06-05T14:11:18Z

well, it depends on who you call finance people.  i am a finance
professor, and i use R for my own work these days.  two of my colleagues
are using S on occasion, S being "close enough" IMHO.

how about students?  I am also writing an introductory finance text
book, which is currently freely available from my website
(http://welch.som.yale.edu/book/).  all the figures will eventually be
done in R (at the moment, some are still in gnuplot), the book will say
so, and i will provide the code for it.  the statistical analysis is
done in R, but much of it is not shown (it is just an intro text book).
hopefully, this will get more finance students asking "what is this
program?  how can i use it? etc."

but R has also huge drawbacks.  most importantly, there is no good
*current* textbook for an intro R user.  that is, not for the fancy
statistical techniques, but lots about data manipulation, plots, linear
regression, heteroskedasticity and related (white-like) corrections,
programming, "cookbook" (ala perl cookbook---more about the simple
stuff:  how to delete or insert a row, how to delete or insert a column,
typical problems, especially when doing IO).  so, honestly, i cannot
recommend R to my finance students right now.   this mailing
list---wonderful as it is [though sometimes "grumpy"]---cannot be a
substitute for such an intro R textbook.  i cannot ask 300 students to
use it as their support hotline.  i am afraid that if R becomes more
successful, this mailing list will be overwhelmed.  the 10-30 people in
the know who donate their time to help here just cannot do it.   we
definitely do need this R textbook.  and, though I love the first parts
of Ripley&Venables, they want it to be a "stats book in R", not a
book
about R.  (witness brian ripley's annoyed reaction everytime i tried to
suggest elaborations on the first part, or them writing another book.)

one more big problem:  the name "R".  I cannot easily specify to do a
comprehensive google search on subject matter "insert and R".  A
single
letter like R just does not connect well with google.  this is of course
steeped in too much history, but a name change would help---calling it
some random 6-letter combination.

regards,

/ivo welch