Subject: [R] Your opinions Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 15:03:15 -0700 (PDT) From: DAVID JENSEN To: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch I am a long-time statistician and SAS programmer interested in learning R or S-Plus. I am intrigued by being able to do statistical analysis in a more interactive environment than I am used to in SAS, not to mention using the much better and easier graphics capabilities. In other words I am tired of having to develop a whole SAS program just to read some data in, do an ANOVA and a scatterplot. From what I have learned of R/S-Plus it appears to be a whole lot easier (and much more fun) to do things like this in R/S-Plus than it is in SAS. If it matters, I will be running R or S-Plus in Windows 2000. For starters, I have access to both R 1.60 and S-Plus 2000 with the ability to obtain a low-cost student license for S-Plus 6 in the near future if I decide to. So the availability of either system is the same. As an absolute beginner, I would like your opinions on which environment would be preferable - R or S-Plus. Let's assume that I am willing to put in the time and effort to make the obvious differences between the two environments (the GUI interface in S-Plus) a non-issue. I am a programmer so I prefer to learn and use the command-line interface anyway. So let's just say that I would very seldom use the GUI in S-Plus anyway (that may or may not be true but I am trying to make things equal in terms of the two environments' capabilities rather than judging them by how convienient they are). Is there a practical reason to choose R over S in terms of functionality or efficiency? I will have some fairly large datasets (over 100,000 obs with 40 variables) but mostly smaller datasets with only a couple thousand observations. Am I better off, given the fact that I have access to S-Plus to use it given the built-in conveniences which include the GUI. Or is there a very practical reason to choose R, other than the fact that I have great admiration for an open-source software project and those who contribute to it. If I did not have the access I do to S-Plus, it would be a no-brainer. I would happily choose R. But given the fact I do have access to S-Plus, is there a reason to instead choose R? Is what I learn to do in R directly applicable to S-Plus or are the differences profound enough as to be confusing switching back and forth? Thanks so much in advance for your advice. Dave __________________________________________________ the expert host your web site -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request@stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._