[R] Reasons to Use R

Gabor Grothendieck
Mon, 09 Apr 2007 16:43:30 -0000

I might be wrong about this but I thought that the licenses for at least
some of the commercial packages do let you make a copy of the one
you have at work for home use.

On 4/9/07, Greg Snow <Greg.Snow at intermountainmail.org>
wrote:
> Here are a couple more thougts to add to what you have already received:
>
> You mentioned that price is not at issue, but there are other costs than
> money that you may want to look at.  On my work machine I have R,
> S-PLUS, SAS, SPSS, and a couple of other stats programs; on my laptop
> and home computers I have R installed.  So, if a deadline is looming and
> I am working on a project mainly in R, it is easy to work on it on the
> bus or at home (or in a boring meeting), the same does not work for a
> SAS or SPSS project (Hmm, thinking about this now, maybe I need to do
> less in R :-).
>
> R and S-PLUS are very flexible/customizable, if you have a certain plot
> that you make often you can write your own function/script to do it
> automatically, most other programs will give you their standard, then
> you have to modify it to meet your specifications.  With sweave (and the
> odf and html extensions) you can automate whole reports, very useful for
> things that you do month after month.
>
> And what I think is the biggest advantage of R and S-PLUS is that they
> strongly encourage you to think about your data.  Other programs (at
> least that I am familiar with) tend to have 1 specific way of treating
> your data, and expect you to modify your data to fit that programs
> model.  These models can be overrestrictive (force you to restructure
> your data to fit their model) or underrestrictive (allow things that
> should really be separate data objects to be combined into a single
> "dataset") and sometimes both.  S on the other hand allows many
> different ways to store and work with your data, and as you analyze the
> data, different branches of new analysis open up depending on early
> results rather than just getting stock output for a procedure.  If all
> you want is a black box where data goes in one end and a specific answer
> comes out the other, then most programs will work; but if you want to
> really understand what your data has to tell you, then R/S-PLUS makes
> this easy and natural.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
>
> --
> Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
> Statistical Data Center
> Intermountain Healthcare
> greg.snow at intermountainmail.org
> (801) 408-8111
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
> > [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Lorenzo
Isella
> > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 9:02 AM
> > To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> > Subject: [R] Reasons to Use R
> >
> > Dear All,
> > The institute I work for is organizing an internal workshop
> > for High Performance Computing (HPC).
> > I am planning to attend it and talk a bit about fluid
> > dynamics, but there is also quite a lot of interest devoted
> > to data post-processing and management of huge data sets.
> > A lot of people are interested in image processing/pattern
> > recognition and statistic applied to geography/ecology, but I
> > would like not to post this on too many lists.
> > The final aim of the workshop is  understanding hardware
> > requirements and drafting a list of the equipment we would
> > like to buy. I think this could be the venue to talk about R as well.
> > Therefore, even if it is not exactly a typical mailing list
> > question, I would like to have suggestions about where to
> > collect info about:
> > (1)Institutions (not only academia) using R (2)Hardware
> > requirements, possibly benchmarks (3)R & clusters, R &
> > multiple CPU machines, R performance on different hardware.
> > (4)finally, a list of the advantages for using R over
> > commercial statistical packages. The money-saving in itself
> > is not a reason good enough and some people are scared by the
> > lack of professional support, though this mailing list is
> > simply wonderful.
> >
> > Kind Regards
> >
> > Lorenzo Isella
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide
> > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> >
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>