This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R?s Power By ASHLEE VANCE To some people R is just the 18th letter of the alphabet. To others, it?s the rating on racy movies, a measure of an attic?s insulation or what pirates in movies say. R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it. But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use. ?R is really important to the point that it?s hard to overvalue it,? said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. ?It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.? It is also free. R is an open-source program, and its popularity reflects a shift in the type of software used inside corporations. Open-source software is free for anyone to use and modify. I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Dell make billions of dollars a year selling servers that run the open-source Linux operating system, which competes with Windows from Microsoft. Most Web sites are displayed using an open-source application called Apache, and companies increasingly rely on the open-source MySQL database to store their critical information. Many people view the end results of all this technology via the Firefox Web browser, also open-source software. R is similar to other programming languages, like C, Java and Perl, in that it helps people perform a wide variety of computing tasks by giving them access to various commands. For statisticians, however, R is particularly useful because it contains a number of built-in mechanisms for organizing data, running calculations on the information and creating graphical representations of data sets. Some people familiar with R describe it as a supercharged version of Microsoft?s Excel spreadsheet software that can help illuminate data trends more clearly than is possible by entering information into rows and columns. What makes R so useful ? and helps explain its quick acceptance ? is that statisticians, engineers and scientists can improve the software?s code or write variations for specific tasks. Packages written for R add advanced algorithms, colored and textured graphs and mining techniques to dig deeper into databases. Close to 1,600 different packages reside on just one of the many Web sites devoted to R, and the number of packages has grown exponentially. One package, called BiodiversityR, offers a graphical interface aimed at making calculations of environmental trends easier. Another package, called Emu, analyzes speech patterns, while GenABEL is used to study the human genome. The financial services community has demonstrated a particular affinity for R; dozens of packages exist for derivatives analysis alone. ?The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things,? said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. ?And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that?s already available, so you?re standing on the shoulders of giants.? R first appeared in 1996, when the statistics professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland in New Zealand released the code as a free software package. According to them, the notion of devising something like R sprang up during a hallway conversation. They both wanted technology better suited for their statistics students, who needed to analyze data and produce graphical models of the information. Most comparable software had been designed by computer scientists and proved hard to use. Lacking deep computer science training, the professors considered their coding efforts more of an academic game than anything else. Nonetheless, starting in about 1991, they worked on R full time. ?We were pretty much inseparable for five or six years,? Mr. Gentleman said. ?One person would do the typing and one person would do the thinking.? Some statisticians who took an early look at the software considered it rough around the edges. But despite its shortcomings, R immediately gained a following with people who saw the possibilities in customizing the free software. John M. Chambers, a former Bell Labs researcher who is now a consulting professor of statistics at Stanford University, was an early champion. At Bell Labs, Mr. Chambers had helped develop S, another statistics software project, which was meant to give researchers of all stripes an accessible data analysis tool. It was, however, not an open-source project. The software failed to generate broad interest and ultimately the rights to S ended up in the hands of Tibco Software. Now R is surpassing what Mr. Chambers had imagined possible with S. ?The diversity and excitement around what all of these people are doing is great,? Mr. Chambers said. While it is difficult to calculate exactly how many people use R, those most familiar with the software estimate that close to 250,000 people work with it regularly. The popularity of R at universities could threaten SAS Institute, the privately held business software company that specializes in data analysis software. SAS, with more than $2 billion in annual revenue, has been the preferred tool of scholars and corporate managers. ?R has really become the second language for people coming out of grad school now, and there?s an amazing amount of code being written for it,? said Max Kuhn, associate director of nonclinical statistics at Pfizer. ?You can look on the SAS message boards and see there is a proportional downturn in traffic.? SAS says it has noticed R?s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. ?I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code," said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, ?We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.? But while SAS plays down R?s corporate appeal, companies like Google and Pfizer say they use the software for just about anything they can. Google, for example, taps R for help understanding trends in ad pricing and for illuminating patterns in the search data it collects. Pfizer has created customized packages for R to let its scientists manipulate their own data during nonclinical drug studies rather than send the information off to a statistician. The co-creators of R express satisfaction that such companies profit from the fruits of their labor and that of hundreds of volunteers. Mr. Ihaka continues to teach statistics at the University of Auckland and wants to create more advanced software. Mr. Gentleman is applying R-based software, called Bioconductor, in work he is doing on computational biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. ?R is a real demonstration of the power of collaboration, and I don?t think you could construct something like this any other way,? Mr. Ihaka said. ?We could have chosen to be commercial, and we would have sold five copies of the software.? Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Pardon my exuberance, but this is simply awesome. What a treat to find on the front web page of the NY Times this morning under Technology. I think the article is very well written by the author, and I think it captures top highlights of why the software and community are so special. Continued high gratitude to all of R-core and the R community for its unique accomplishments. Every bit of praise is well-earned and deserved. I have continuously claimed to colleagues (primarily pharma industry) for the past 8 years or so that R is the most exciting going on in the area of statistics. Thanks, Bill #################### Bill Pikounis Statistician On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 08:10, Zaslavsky, Alan M. <zaslavsk at hcp.med.harvard.edu> wrote:> This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. > > Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html > > January 7, 2009 > Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power > By ASHLEE VANCE >
This is great to see. It's interesting that SAS Institute feels that non-peer-reviewed software with hidden implementations of analytic methods that cannot be reproduced by others should be trusted when building aircraft engines. Frank Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote:> This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. > > Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html > > January 7, 2009 > Data Analysts Captivated by R?s Power > By ASHLEE VANCE > > To some people R is just the 18th letter of the alphabet. To others, it?s the rating on racy movies, a measure of an attic?s insulation or what pirates in movies say. > > R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it. > > But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use. > > ?R is really important to the point that it?s hard to overvalue it,? said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. ?It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.? > > It is also free. R is an open-source program, and its popularity reflects a shift in the type of software used inside corporations. Open-source software is free for anyone to use and modify. I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Dell make billions of dollars a year selling servers that run the open-source Linux operating system, which competes with Windows from Microsoft. Most Web sites are displayed using an open-source application called Apache, and companies increasingly rely on the open-source MySQL database to store their critical information. Many people view the end results of all this technology via the Firefox Web browser, also open-source software. > > R is similar to other programming languages, like C, Java and Perl, in that it helps people perform a wide variety of computing tasks by giving them access to various commands. For statisticians, however, R is particularly useful because it contains a number of built-in mechanisms for organizing data, running calculations on the information and creating graphical representations of data sets. > > Some people familiar with R describe it as a supercharged version of Microsoft?s Excel spreadsheet software that can help illuminate data trends more clearly than is possible by entering information into rows and columns. > > What makes R so useful ? and helps explain its quick acceptance ? is that statisticians, engineers and scientists can improve the software?s code or write variations for specific tasks. Packages written for R add advanced algorithms, colored and textured graphs and mining techniques to dig deeper into databases. > > Close to 1,600 different packages reside on just one of the many Web sites devoted to R, and the number of packages has grown exponentially. One package, called BiodiversityR, offers a graphical interface aimed at making calculations of environmental trends easier. > > Another package, called Emu, analyzes speech patterns, while GenABEL is used to study the human genome. > > The financial services community has demonstrated a particular affinity for R; dozens of packages exist for derivatives analysis alone. > > ?The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things,? said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. ?And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that?s already available, so you?re standing on the shoulders of giants.? > > R first appeared in 1996, when the statistics professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland in New Zealand released the code as a free software package. > > According to them, the notion of devising something like R sprang up during a hallway conversation. They both wanted technology better suited for their statistics students, who needed to analyze data and produce graphical models of the information. Most comparable software had been designed by computer scientists and proved hard to use. > > Lacking deep computer science training, the professors considered their coding efforts more of an academic game than anything else. Nonetheless, starting in about 1991, they worked on R full time. ?We were pretty much inseparable for five or six years,? Mr. Gentleman said. ?One person would do the typing and one person would do the thinking.? > > Some statisticians who took an early look at the software considered it rough around the edges. But despite its shortcomings, R immediately gained a following with people who saw the possibilities in customizing the free software. > > John M. Chambers, a former Bell Labs researcher who is now a consulting professor of statistics at Stanford University, was an early champion. At Bell Labs, Mr. Chambers had helped develop S, another statistics software project, which was meant to give researchers of all stripes an accessible data analysis tool. It was, however, not an open-source project. > > The software failed to generate broad interest and ultimately the rights to S ended up in the hands of Tibco Software. Now R is surpassing what Mr. Chambers had imagined possible with S. > > ?The diversity and excitement around what all of these people are doing is great,? Mr. Chambers said. > > While it is difficult to calculate exactly how many people use R, those most familiar with the software estimate that close to 250,000 people work with it regularly. The popularity of R at universities could threaten SAS Institute, the privately held business software company that specializes in data analysis software. SAS, with more than $2 billion in annual revenue, has been the preferred tool of scholars and corporate managers. > > ?R has really become the second language for people coming out of grad school now, and there?s an amazing amount of code being written for it,? said Max Kuhn, associate director of nonclinical statistics at Pfizer. ?You can look on the SAS message boards and see there is a proportional downturn in traffic.? > > SAS says it has noticed R?s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. > > ?I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code," said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, ?We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.? > > But while SAS plays down R?s corporate appeal, companies like Google and Pfizer say they use the software for just about anything they can. Google, for example, taps R for help understanding trends in ad pricing and for illuminating patterns in the search data it collects. Pfizer has created customized packages for R to let its scientists manipulate their own data during nonclinical drug studies rather than send the information off to a statistician. > > The co-creators of R express satisfaction that such companies profit from the fruits of their labor and that of hundreds of volunteers. > > Mr. Ihaka continues to teach statistics at the University of Auckland and wants to create more advanced software. Mr. Gentleman is applying R-based software, called Bioconductor, in work he is doing on computational biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. > > ?R is a real demonstration of the power of collaboration, and I don?t think you could construct something like this any other way,? Mr. Ihaka said. ?We could have chosen to be commercial, and we would have sold five copies of the software.? > > Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company-- Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University
Thank you for posting this, I found it a very enjoyable read! I am curious, is there an archive of 'R in the Media' or 'R in the Press' articles somewhere? It would be interesting to see how the perception of R has changed/evolved over time relative to other packages. Cheers, Tony Breyal On 7 Jan, 13:10, "Zaslavsky, Alan M." <zasla... at hcp.med.harvard.edu> wrote:> This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. > > Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R > ?http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07pro... > > January 7, 2009 > Data Analysts Captivated by R?s Power > By ASHLEE VANCE > > To some people R is just the 18th letter of the alphabet. To others, it?s the rating on racy movies, a measure of an attic?s insulation or what pirates in movies say. > > R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it. > > But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use. > > ?R is really important to the point that it?s hard to overvalue it,? said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. ?It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.? > > It is also free. R is an open-source program, and its popularity reflects a shift in the type of software used inside corporations. Open-source software is free for anyone to use and modify. I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Dell make billions of dollars a year selling servers that run the open-source Linux operating system, which competes with Windows from Microsoft. Most Web sites are displayed using an open-source application called Apache, and companies increasingly rely on the open-source MySQL database to store their critical information. Many people view the end results of all this technology via the Firefox Web browser, also open-source software. > > R is similar to other programming languages, like C, Java and Perl, in that it helps people perform a wide variety of computing tasks by giving them access to various commands. For statisticians, however, R is particularly useful because it contains a number of built-in mechanisms for organizing data, running calculations on the information and creating graphical representations of data sets. > > Some people familiar with R describe it as a supercharged version of Microsoft?s Excel spreadsheet software that can help illuminate data trends more clearly than is possible by entering information into rows and columns. > > What makes R so useful ? and helps explain its quick acceptance ? is that statisticians, engineers and scientists can improve the software?s code or write variations for specific tasks. Packages written for R add advanced algorithms, colored and textured graphs and mining techniques to dig deeper into databases. > > Close to 1,600 different packages reside on just one of the many Web sites devoted to R, and the number of packages has grown exponentially. One package, called BiodiversityR, offers a graphical interface aimed at making calculations of environmental trends easier. > > Another package, called Emu, analyzes speech patterns, while GenABEL is used to study the human genome. > > The financial services community has demonstrated a particular affinity for R; dozens of packages exist for derivatives analysis alone. > > ?The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things,? said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. ?And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that?s already available, so you?re standing on the shoulders of giants.? > > R first appeared in 1996, when the statistics professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland in New Zealand released the code as a free software package. > > According to them, the notion of devising something like R sprang up during a hallway conversation. They both wanted technology better suited for their statistics students, who needed to analyze data and produce graphical models of the information. Most comparable software had been designed by computer scientists and proved hard to use. > > Lacking deep computer science training, the professors considered their coding efforts more of an academic game than anything else. Nonetheless, starting in about 1991, they worked on R full time. ?We were pretty much inseparable for five or six years,? Mr. Gentleman said. ?One person would do the typing and one person would do the thinking.? > > Some statisticians who took an early look at the software considered it rough around the edges. But despite its shortcomings, R immediately gained a following with people who saw the possibilities in customizing the free software. > > John M. Chambers, a former Bell Labs researcher who is now a consulting professor of statistics at Stanford University, was an early champion. At Bell Labs, Mr. Chambers had helped develop S, another statistics software project, which was meant to give researchers of all stripes an accessible data analysis tool. It was, however, not an open-source project. > > The software failed to generate broad interest and ultimately the rights to S ended up in the hands of Tibco Software. Now R is surpassing what Mr. Chambers had imagined possible with S. > > ?The diversity and excitement around what all of these people are doing is great,? Mr. Chambers said. > > While it is difficult to calculate exactly how many people use R, those most familiar with the software estimate that close to 250,000 people work with it regularly. The popularity of R at universities could threaten SAS Institute, the privately held business software company that specializes in data analysis software. SAS, with more than $2 billion in annual revenue, has been the preferred tool of scholars and corporate managers. > > ?R has really become the second language for people coming out of grad school now, and there?s an amazing amount of code being written for it,? said Max Kuhn, associate director of nonclinical statistics at Pfizer. ?You can look on the SAS message boards and see there is a proportional downturn in traffic.? > > SAS says it has noticed R?s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. > > ?I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code," said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, ?We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.? > > But while SAS plays down R?s corporate appeal, companies like Google and Pfizer say they use the software for just about anything they can. Google, for example, taps R for help understanding trends in ad pricing and for illuminating patterns in the search data it collects. Pfizer has created customized packages for R to let its scientists manipulate their own data during nonclinical drug studies rather than send the information off to a statistician. > > The co-creators of R express satisfaction that such companies profit from the fruits of their labor and that of hundreds of volunteers. > > Mr. Ihaka continues to teach statistics at the University of Auckland and wants to create more advanced software. Mr. Gentleman is applying R-based software, called Bioconductor, in work he is doing on computational biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. > > ?R is a real demonstration of the power of collaboration, and I don?t think you could construct something like this any other way,? Mr. Ihaka said. ?We could have chosen to be commercial, and we would have sold five copies of the software.? > > Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company > > ______________________________________________ > R-h... at r-project.org mailing listhttps://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guidehttp://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote:> This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. > > Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html > > > January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R?s Power By ASHLEE VANCE > > > SAS says it has noticed R?s rising popularity at universities, > despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses > the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people > working on very hard tasks. > > ?I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that > want free, readily available code," said Anne H. Milley, director of > technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, ?We have customers who > build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware > when I get on a jet.? >Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? Kevin -- Kevin E. Thorpe Biostatistician/Trialist, Knowledge Translation Program Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health University of Toronto email: kevin.thorpe at utoronto.ca Tel: 416.864.5776 Fax: 416.864.6057
Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote:> This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. > > Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html >Thanks for the heads up. The R morale is going through the roof! I've given three courses on R since the second half of 2007 here in Chile (geostatistics, Fisheries Libraries for R, and generalized linear models) and all my three audiences (professionals working in academia, government, and private research institutions) were very much impressed by the power of R. I spent as much time on R itself as on the statistical topics, since students wanted to learn data management and graphics once they started to grasp the basic elements. R creators, Core Team, package creators and maintainers, and experts on the list, thanks so much for such a great work and such an open attitude. You lead by example. Rub?n
On 1/7/2009 9:44 AM, Kevin E. Thorpe wrote:> Zaslavsky, Alan M. wrote: >> This article is accompanied by nice pictures of Robert and Ross. >> >> Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R >> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html >> >> >> January 7, 2009 Data Analysts Captivated by R?s Power By ASHLEE VANCE >> >> >> SAS says it has noticed R?s rising popularity at universities, >> despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses >> the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people >> working on very hard tasks. >> >> ?I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that >> want free, readily available code," said Anne H. Milley, director of >> technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, ?We have customers who >> build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware >> when I get on a jet.? >> > > Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be > humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted?To me it just seemed like a "blast from the past". Duncan Murdoch
The article quotes John Chambers, but it doesn't mention that R started out as an implementation of the S language. I don't suppose Insightful is too happy about that. The SAS spokesman quoted in the article is clearly whistling past the graveyard. -- Jeff
I believe the SAS person shot themselves in the foot more in more ways than one. In my mind, the reason you would pay, as Frank said, for> non-peer-reviewed software with hidden implementations of analytic > methods that cannot be reproduced by othersWould be so that you can sue them later when a software problem in the designing of the engine makes your plane fall out of the sky! Bryan ************* Bryan Hanson Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry DePauw University, Greencastle IN USA>> ?I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that >> want free, readily available code," said Anne H. Milley, director of >> technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, ?We have customers who >> build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware >> when I get on a jet.? >> > > Thanks for posting. Does anyone else find the statement by SAS to be > humourous yet arrogant and short-sighted? > > Kevin
I would also point out that the use of the term "freeware" as opposed to "FOSS" by the SAS rep, comes off as being unprofessional and deliberately condescending... The author of the article, to his credit, was pretty consistent in using open source terminology. Regards, Marc on 01/07/2009 10:26 AM Bryan Hanson wrote:> I believe the SAS person shot themselves in the foot more in more ways than > one. In my mind, the reason you would pay, as Frank said, for > >> non-peer-reviewed software with hidden implementations of analytic >> methods that cannot be reproduced by others > > Would be so that you can sue them later when a software problem in the > designing of the engine makes your plane fall out of the sky!
Note that the mts object I posted already had Jan 2009 removed and also had the NA rows removed. On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:58 PM, hadley wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:>> You might want to remove the 2009 data from each of the three lists >> given that the January data is not yet complete. >> >> The result of including the January 2009 data in your plots is that the >> growth trajectory for the smoothed curves for SAS-L and R-Help appear to >> be leveling or even declining, when at least for R-Help, that is not the >> case. The S-News curve is not affected significantly, given the already >> declining counts. >> >> The effect of the 2009 data is most noticeable in the log scale plot. >> >> Thus: >> >> all <- subset(all, year < 2009) > > Good point - thanks for the fix! > > Hadley > > -- > http://had.co.nz/ >
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 10:26 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:> > On 7 January 2009 at 18:24, Gabor Grothendieck wrote: > | By running the code below we see that the: > | - sum of the three seems to be rising at a constant rate > | - S is declining > | - SAS and R are rising > | - R is rising the fastest through its completed its phase > | of highest growth which ended around 2004 > > I wonder whether we need to account for traffic on all the additional r-sig-* > mailing lists ? > > Of the handful that I follow, some seem to have taken traffic from r-help. > This could account for (at least parts of) the apparent traffic growth > slowdown since 2004 as many of these added lists appeared only in the last > few years. >Good observation. It would be interesting to combine the data from all the lists to see what the effect is.
The open-source mentality is invaluable, as most on this list know. That is what keeps the R evolution progressing at a pace that SAS cannot keep up with. On a side note (a very side note), I am a zealot for an exercise program called Crossfit. Crossfit has adopted the same open-source mentality as found in the Linux model and has grown into the most valuable fitness and strength training program on the planet. There is an online journal (called crossfit journal) http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/CrossFitJournal-Budding_Retrospecti ve.pdf that lists the three components of the linux open-source model: The Linux development model: * Release early and often * Delegate everything you can * Be open to the point of promiscuity Crossfit then followed with its own open-source principles: The CrossFit development model: * Release early and often - Daily! * Delegate everything you can - Meet the experts from the realms of climbing, lifting, swimming, gymnastics, fighting, you name it. * Be open to the point of promiscuity - Read the WOD weblog comments. - Check out the discussion board. - See photos of athletes puking! The point being, it is not the program itself that is amazing, but the people that have made serious contributions to it that make it so. In the same vein, R is only a representation of the many, many valuable talented people who are constantly adding to its functionality because of its open-source nature. That is, R itself is good, useful etc. But, it is the people that add to it and help it grow as a scientific tool that keep it as the lingua franca.> -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org > [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Max Kuhn > Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 10:17 AM > To: r-help at r-project.org > Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times > > More commentary on Slashdot: > > http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/07/2316227 > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org 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. >