R help - Apr 2017 - The R-help community list was started on this day 20 years ago

Today, it is been 20 years since Martin M?chler started the R-help
community list (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/). The first
post was written by Ross Ihaka on 1997-04-01:

Subject: R-alpha: R-testers: pmin heisenbug
From: Ross Ihaka <ihaka at stat.auckland.ac.nz>
When: Tue Apr 1 10:35:48 CEST 1997
Archive: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/1997-April/001488.html

This is a post about R's memory model. We're talking R v0.50 beta. I
think that the paragraph at the end provides a nice anecdote on the
importance not to be overwhelmed by problems ahead:

   "(The consumption of one cell per string is perhaps the major
memory problem in R - we didn't design it with large problems in mind.
It is probably fixable, but it will mean a lot of work)."

We all know the story; an endless number of hours has been put in by
many contributors throughout the years, making The R Project and its
community the great experience it is today.

Thank you!

Henrik

On Sat, 1 Apr 2017 11:19:07 -0700
Henrik Bengtsson <henrik.bengtsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Today, it is been 20 years since Martin M?chler started the R-help
> community list (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/). The first
> post was written by Ross Ihaka on 1997-04-01:
> 
> Subject: R-alpha: R-testers: pmin heisenbug
> From: Ross Ihaka <ihaka at stat.auckland.ac.nz>
> When: Tue Apr 1 10:35:48 CEST 1997
> Archive: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/1997-April/001488.html
> 
> This is a post about R's memory model. We're talking R v0.50 beta.
I
> think that the paragraph at the end provides a nice anecdote on the
> importance not to be overwhelmed by problems ahead:
> 
>    "(The consumption of one cell per string is perhaps the major
> memory problem in R - we didn't design it with large problems in mind.
> It is probably fixable, but it will mean a lot of work)."
> 
> We all know the story; an endless number of hours has been put in by
> many contributors throughout the years, making The R Project and its
> community the great experience it is today.
> 
> Thank you!
> 
> Henrik
> 
No fooling?

Not fooling, no. 

However, r-help/r-announce/r-devel was a restructuring of the r-testers list.
This goes back to March 20, 1996. The first archived post of r-testers is

	? just a test (the 'archiving' does not yet work) -->> Nr. 2
Martin Maechler

so the actual start may have been a few days before.

...

Incidentally, looking at the last posts of r-testers, it seems that CRAN turned
20 last week:

Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 16:20:35 +0100
Message-Id: <199703261520.QAA08097 at aragorn.ci.tuwien.ac.at>
From: Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at ci.tuwien.ac.at>
To: r-testers at stat.math.ethz.ch

Subject: R-alpha: ANNOUNCE:  CRAN

This is a first (alpha) announcement for the

		Comprehensive R Archive Network 
			    (CRAN)

project.
...



-pd


> On 02 Apr 2017, at 08:17 , John <jwd at surewest.net> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 1 Apr 2017 11:19:07 -0700
> Henrik Bengtsson <henrik.bengtsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Today, it is been 20 years since Martin M?chler started the R-help
>> community list (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/). The first
>> post was written by Ross Ihaka on 1997-04-01:
>> 
>> Subject: R-alpha: R-testers: pmin heisenbug
>> From: Ross Ihaka <ihaka at stat.auckland.ac.nz>
>> When: Tue Apr 1 10:35:48 CEST 1997
>> Archive: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/1997-April/001488.html
>> 
>> This is a post about R's memory model. We're talking R v0.50
beta. I
>> think that the paragraph at the end provides a nice anecdote on the
>> importance not to be overwhelmed by problems ahead:
>> 
>>   "(The consumption of one cell per string is perhaps the major
>> memory problem in R - we didn't design it with large problems in
mind.
>> It is probably fixable, but it will mean a lot of work)."
>> 
>> We all know the story; an endless number of hours has been put in by
>> many contributors throughout the years, making The R Project and its
>> community the great experience it is today.
>> 
>> Thank you!
>> 
>> Henrik
>> 
> No fooling?
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com