R help - Sep 2010 - The future of R - Ross Ihaka stirs discussions around the web

Hello all,

There is currently a (very !) lively discussions happening around the
web, surrounding the following topics:
1) Is R efficient? (scripting wise, and performance wise)
2) Should R be written from scratch?
3) What should be the license of R (if it was made a new)?

Very serious people have taken part in the debates so far.  I hope to let
you know of the places I came by, so you might be able to follow/participate
in these (IMHO) important discussions.

The discussions started in the response for the following blog post on
Xi'An's blog:
http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/insane/
Followed by the (short) response post by Ross Ihaka:
http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/simply-start-over-and-build-something-better/
Other discussions started to appear on Andrew Gelman's blog:
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/09/ross_ihaka_to_r.html
And (many) more responses started to appear in the hackers news website:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1687054


I hope these discussions will have fruitful results for our community,
Tal

----------------Contact
Details:-------------------------------------------------------
Contact me: Tal.Galili@gmail.com |  972-52-7275845
Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
www.r-statistics.com (English)
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	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

There was an award session at the Vancouver JSM where both Ross Ihaka
and Robert Gentleman spoke.  The simply-start-over post sounds very
much like Ross's JSM talk.  Robert's response was much more positive -
coming from the perspective of developing BioConductor I think.  I
don't recall the details, but the cartoon version is something like "R
isn't really broken".

albyn

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 09:51:39PM +0200, Tal Galili
wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> There is currently a (very !) lively discussions happening around the
> web, surrounding the following topics:
> 1) Is R efficient? (scripting wise, and performance wise)
> 2) Should R be written from scratch?
> 3) What should be the license of R (if it was made a new)?
> 
> Very serious people have taken part in the debates so far.  I hope to let
> you know of the places I came by, so you might be able to
follow/participate
> in these (IMHO) important discussions.
> 
> The discussions started in the response for the following blog post on
> Xi'An's blog:
> http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/insane/
> Followed by the (short) response post by Ross Ihaka:
>
http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/simply-start-over-and-build-something-better/
> Other discussions started to appear on Andrew Gelman's blog:
>
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/09/ross_ihaka_to_r.html
> And (many) more responses started to appear in the hackers news website:
> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1687054
> 
> 
> I hope these discussions will have fruitful results for our community,
> Tal
> 
> ----------------Contact
> Details:-------------------------------------------------------
> Contact me: Tal.Galili at gmail.com |  972-52-7275845
> Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
> www.r-statistics.com (English)
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
> ______________________________________________
> 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.
> 
-- 
Albyn Jones
Reed College
jones at reed.edu

Hello

Dne Po 13. z??? 2010 14:51:39 Tal Galili napsal(a):
> Hello all,
>
> There is currently a (very !) lively discussions happening around the
> web, surrounding the following topics:
> 1) Is R efficient? (scripting wise, and performance wise)
> 2) Should R be written from scratch?
> 3) What should be the license of R (if it was made a new)?
>
> Very serious people have taken part in the debates so far.  I hope to let
> you know of the places I came by, so you might be able to
follow/participate
> in these (IMHO) important discussions.
>
> The discussions started in the response for the following blog post on
> Xi'An's blog:
> http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/insane/
> Followed by the (short) response post by Ross Ihaka:
>
http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/simply-start-over-and-build-something->
> better/
> Other discussions started to appear on Andrew Gelman's blog:
> http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/09/
> ross_ihaka_to_r.> html
> And (many) more responses started to appear in the hackers news website:
> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1687054
>
> I hope these discussions will have fruitful results for our community,
> Tal
I'm not computer expert so I do not know if it is easyer to fix all  
bugs in R or start from scratch. But starting from zero is VERY  
difficult. Those, who know Linux little bit will propably remember  
example of KDE4. Very hard, paniful and after almost 3 years still not  
fully fixed.
Another problem is keeping compatibility with thousands of contributed  
modules and scripts. Yes, it is very important part of R ecosystem.
For licence I like GPL v.3, and also any licence accpeted by Free  
Software Foundation is good. :-)
But here, I wish point out one issue, which can be fixed relatively  
easily: R would deserve much more better web running some good  
open-source CMS. I have very good experince with Drupal (IMHO the best  
available CMS) and Plone. Current state is one big dissaster. Web with  
all modern features, user forum and so on. It would be really helpful.
Best regards,
-- 
Vojt?ch Zeisek

Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Charles Uni., Prague, CZ
Institute of Botany, Academy of Science, Czech Republic
Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux

http://www.natur.cuni.cz/faculty-en?set_language=en
http://www.ibot.cas.cz/?p=index&site=en
http://www.opensuse.org/
http://web.natur.cuni.cz/~zeisek/
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