Terry Therneau wrote:
Hi - Seeing Insightful sponsor R events, open up access to R within their
system, I'm wondering if this entails any risk to the development of R
itself. I assume that R's core development team does what's best for R, but
couldn't Insightful's influence prove to be a distraction at best? From an R
user standpoint, why spend energy aligning both systems, if such a thing is
actually being contemplated or even implemented?
I've seen this "abandon the old folks" attitude in some of the R community.
Thankfully not very much of it because it really bothers me. I think that the
stance is both arrogant and short sighted. (In fairness to the poster of the
query above, I think that they are asking an honest question.)
I've used S since the late 1980s -- I even have an AT&T source code license
for it saved away in my nostalgia drawer. The switch to Splus was a big
advance, they made substantial improvements to the code and have continued to do
so. (If nothing else, cleaning up and expanding the help files; a thankless
task that is none the less of great utility to a user). I've worked directly
with the company since the early 90s, and they have consistently made my life
easier wrt support and development of the survival code.
There is room for both commercial and freeware entities in the market. Some
places really do want paid support and a less agressive release cycle. Our
group for instance often has a new release of SAS or Splus in house for about a
year before making it the default. Predictability (knowing how it works) is
more important than cutting edge. As one of my colleages put it when
interviewing a candidate "This is not school: a B+ is not good enough. When
working with researchers we have to get it all the answers right". This
pressure can be even higher in pharma.
That said, yes there is some effort in maintaining compatability. There are
not a lot of differences between the R and Splus dialects of the S language, but
a few are there. It is not difficult to write code that works with both
packages, the survival package being an example. It's currently about 30
thousand lines, and has about 30 is.R() constructs (of which almost all involve
oldClass vs class). Having the package in both systems is, to my mind, well
worth that small level of effort. You can of course write R or Splus code that
does not port well by seeking out the differences. But individual authors need
to make up their own minds, and I suspect that Insightful will bear most of the
burden of importing an R package.
Terry Therneau
Terry and I have a friendly ongoing argument about some of these points.
I feel the slow release cycle stifles innovation and inclusion of new
features and bug corrections. A chaotic release cycle has always worked
well for me.
Concerning compatibiliy, I spent hundreds of hours making the R Hmisc
and Design packages compatible with S-Plus but now find that in the
latest releases of S-Plus, which are supposed to be more R-compatible,
that my packages are not included in the list of R packages that have
been incorporated into S-Plus and hence the support for my packages has
in some ways actually lessened instead of being enhanced.
Concerning S-Plus vs. R in terms of functionality and speed, there are
very significant differences in the two.
Just my $.02 worth.
Frank
--
Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine
Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University
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