if any of you haven’t seen this yet, the NY Times published an article about R! for some strange reason, it didn’t make the “most emailed” feed. go figure.
the first thing i thought when i saw it was, way to go R! i had never heard of R when i first started my graduate program — i was still using SPSS. but as a poor graduate student, i didn’t want to pay yearly renewal fees for expensive licenses, and i started learning R because it is free. i’ve been hooked ever since.
as for the article in the nytimes, i think this statement isn’t quite accurate:
But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use.
i think you definitely need some programming experience to get the command-line interface of R, which is where the power is. i never had much luck with the GUI point-and-click add-on. but i do agree with Daryl Pregibon, who is apparently a research scientist at Google and a fan of R:
R is really important to the point that it’s hard to overvalue it.
and, i love the part in the article about the reaction of SAS Institute to R:
“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.”
sounds a little defensive, eh?
for me, one of the biggest benefits of using R is the really nice looking, professional quality, complex graphs and charts R produces — they kick the ass of anything Excel or SPSS can generate. and, there are times when R reminds me of Lisp, which makes me happy. using R confidently also requires that one be more knowledgeable about the statistics one is performing (and why) than the point-and-click stats packages do — and i believe this is a good thing! i feel like i’ve become a much better researcher and user of statistics because of R, and i’ve been able to do data munging and analysis that i think would be difficult-to-impossible in SPSS.
however, the R documentation can be a bit maddening at times. either it is too terse, or doesn’t quite cover your exact situation… but R is open source after all, so my expectations are lower than they might be if i had actually paid for the software. a little persistence usually does the trick.
if you’re interested in learning more about R, you can find the software at r-project.org, and my favorite introduction to doing basic stuff with R is hosted by the UCLA Statistical Computing service.
UPDATE: the NY Times article hit the “most emailed” feed finally, only after it was posted to Slashdot yesterday evening.
