[R] History of R

[Paul Gilbert]

Kathy

The dedication of the developers and several other important things have 
already been mentioned. Here are a few points I have not seen.

- I believe S was originally open source (before the term existed and 
before GPL, and license issues were probably clouded with respect to 
changing the code). This meant parts of the community of S user had this 
tradition. Some, no doubt, were a bit upset about the Splus move to 
closed source.

- This community had also significantly contributed to Statlib, so there 
were some "packages" that could be leveraged in the beginning. This may 
have been not so important for what the packages did, but for the fact 
that they gave an extensive test suite, so one could have considerable 
confidence in the results.

- Purchase cost is typically not so important for corporate and 
institutional users, since it is usually dominated by support costs. 
However, young users may often feel they would prefer to have their 
personal investment in something they can easily take with them if they 
move.  Some of us at the other end like the idea that we don't need a 
corporate account to continue research we might be interested in doing 
when we retire.

- All risk averse users should like the idea that programs and acquired 
skills are not tied to the operating system and hardware flavor of the 
month. (R has excelled in this respect.)

- Help on the R lists has always been exceptionally good (sometimes even 
if you don't read the documentation first - but expect to be chastised). 
If you look at the S help list over the past 15 years, you will find 
many of the most difficult questions were answered by people involved 
with R.

- I ran my own code interchangeably in Splus and R for many years 
(starting with R-0.16). For a long time Splus was "production" and R was 
so I would have a backup. For me, the defining factor in moving to R for 
"production" was the introduction of the "package" system.  This is 
really special in the way that it develops the synergy of the community. 
By packaging your code you get to leverage all the code checking and 
documentation checking of the system, and you get to add your own tests 
that run automatically when you build your package. Not only that, but 
if you make your package availabe on CRAN you get not only the useful 
feedback from users, but also the automatic information about what is 
going to break in your code in the next release of R (from the daily 
checks on multiple platforms). This is not only useful to package 
developers, but provides R itself with what I would guess is the largest 
automatic test bed in the industry. The system is also interesting in 
the way that it has resolved one of the big problems of Statlib: there 
is an automatic mechanism for removing broken and unmaintained packages.

Paul Gilbert

Kathy Gerber wrote:
> Earlier today I sent a question to Frank Harrell as an R developer with 
> whom I am most familiar.  He suggested also that I put my questions to 
> the list for additional responses.  Next month I'll be giving a talk on 
> R as an example of high quality open source software.  I think there is 
> much to learn from R as a high quality extensible product that (at least 
> as far as I can tell) has never been "spun" or "hyped" like so many open 
> source fads.
> 
> The question that intrigues me the most is why is R as an open source 
> project is so incredibly successful and other projects, say for example, 
> Octave don't enjoy that level of success?
> 
> I have some ideas of course, but I would really like to know your 
> thoughts when you look at R from such a vantage point.
> 
> Thanks.
> Kathy Gerber
> University of Virginia
> ITC - Research Computing Support
> 
> ______________________________________________
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
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