[R] History of R
Kathy Gerber
kathy at virginia.edu
Sat Feb 16 08:07:43 CET 2008
Thanks to all who responded so thoughtfully. I would like to summarize
briefly the observations and opinions so far with some of my own
interpretations and thoughts. John Fox is working on a much deeper
history scheduled for August, and his three factors are a good starting
point.
John Fox wrote:
> Dear Kathy,
>
> As Achim has mentioned, I've been doing interviews with members of the R
> Core team and with some other people central to the R Project. Although I
> haven't entirely organized and finished reflecting on this material, the
> following factors come immediately to mind:
>
> (1) Doug has already mentioned the personal and technical talents of the
> original developers, and their generosity in opening up development to a
> Core group and in making R open source. To that I would add the collective
> talents of the Core group as a whole.
>
There are three attributes here:
a) Personal talent: I take this to mean communication and teaching
ability along with leadership. These are the talents and skills that
provide groundwork for a mature type of collaboration, more along the
lines found in tightly focused academic areas. I would think that these
attributes are big factors in why R has not devolved into forks and
holy wars.
b) Technical talent: Both the technical talent and domain knowledge of
the original developers and the R Core group are better than
consistently solid. The leaders are not rock stars or cult figures.
c) Generosity: The responses themselves sincerely gave credit to
others. While this may appear to be consistent with Eric Raymond's
notions of open source as built upon a "gift culture," I haven't really
seen this going on elsewhere at such a level.
> (2) R implements the S language, which already was in wide use, and which
> has many attractive features (each of use, etc.).
>
>
One person who emailed privately pointed out that many open source
projects are "knock-offs," e.g., linux itself is a unix knock-off. I
believe the point is that R is not a totally new approach or invention,
rather it is based upon advancing some product or collection of ideas
that are already in place.
> (3) The R package system and the establishment of CRAN allowed literally
> hundreds of developers to contribute to the broader R Project. More
> generally, the Core group worked to integrate users into the R Project,
> e.g., through R News, the r-help list (though naive users aren't always
> treated gently there), and the useR conferences.
>
>
Again, this is another distinctive feature, perhaps not in concept but
in degree and level of actual success thanks to good planning. Like so
many other points, this goes back to the leadership.
Another point made was the need or demand for such an application. Yet
another was the planning that goes into avoiding breakage of packages.
What no one mentioned though was the idea of standards.
Finally, in comparing with Octave, it was mentioned that Octave may be
stuck in a position of playing catch-up to Matlab.
What I have here is far from complete, but I did want to give some
feedback tonight. Again, thanks to you all for such articulate
responses, and I will point to my slides, and later on write up a summary.
Kathy Gerber
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