[ESS] README organization

[Rodney Sparapani]

Douglas Bates wrote:
> Another part of the ess documentation that you may wish to consider is
> the presentation order and emphasis of systems supported by ESS.  I
> noticed recently when watching an installation of ESS that there are
> still .el files compiled and installed for S+3, S+4, ... and that much
> of the documentation on ESS processes is written in terms of an S+3
> process. Do you know if anyone has a working S-PLUS, version 3 or S
> version 4?  I would be shocked if one existed.  I know the computer,
> franz.stat.wisc.edu, that housed the CVS archive for S version 4, was
> retired many years ago.
>
> The people who are involved in the development of ESS know the history
> of the S language and understand that R was developed as an open
> source version of the S language. However most new users of R have not
> heard of S-PLUS and, if they did hear of it, would probably be
> perplexed as to why they would want to pay a considerable sum of money
> to obtain an inferior implementation of R.
>
> My guess is that the overwhelming usage of ESS is for R, Sweave, etc.,
> second most popular usage is for SAS, third for Stata.
>
> I know there was a recent release of S+ (apparently it has changed its
> name - the people at Insightful used to insist that it be called
> S-PLUS and not S+ but now Tibco calls it S+)  so there may still be
> some users but I think that any S+ user base is vestigial.  I would
> not be surprised if Tibco folded S+ into the Spotfire product and
> ceased to sell it as a separate product.
>
> Why not acknowledge that "the S language" today means R?  John
> Chambers, the creator of the S language, has.  See the title of his
> latest book.
>
>   
Hi Doug:

As a former S user myself (do you remember giving me advice circa 1990?),
I am well aware that S is not widely available.  However, the ESS developers
have been relatively conservative.  We almost never remove 
functionality, rather
we try to provide new functionality that replaces it.  Of course, 
occasionally,
this is buggy and inadvertantly breaks something that worked before.

This conservatism has carried over to the documentation.  Much of the 
original
docs are still there and new sections have been added that are meant as a
replacement for the most part.  The task of re-organization of the docs is
vast.  In fact, we have been working on it for the last 5 years or so.  The
fact that you didn't notice just shows how much work still needs to be done.

Lastly, I find the phrase "the S language" to be confusing.  John C. is free
to use it, but I would not have guessed that he meant R.  We have been using
"the S family" in the docs (and you might notice from the thread earlier 
today
that I made that change to the README intro as well).  And, as always, 
patches
are welcome :o)  Thanks to you all for your feedback.

-- 
Rodney Sparapani      Center for Patient Care & Outcomes Research (PCOR)
Sr. Biostatistician              http://www.mcw.edu/pcor
4 wheels good, 2 wheels better!  Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW)
WWLD?:  What Would Lombardi Do?  Milwaukee, WI, USA