This is my New Year wishlist for R features. One common thread is that I find I sometimes use languages other than R including javascript, Windows batch and gawk. Others have mentioned other languages too. It would be nice if, in those cases I could use R simplifying development into a single environment (viz. R). The following are not in any order. 1. Self Contained Executables Make it possible to create self contained R executables. Something like tcl starkits http://www.equi4.com/starkit.html or Python py2exe http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/py2exe is what I am thinking of. Its ok if they are interpreted as long as its all transparent. 2. R as a Filter Support using R as a filter analogously to awk/gawk. e.g. echo a x 3 | R -f myprog.R | findstr /i answer echo a x 3 | R -e "chartr('x', 'X', readLines(STDIN()))" | findstr /i X This would allow replacement of certain awk/gawk filters with R. In the above STDIN or some would refer to the echo output, not to further input from the script. I think /dev/stdin can already be used in UNIX but not in Windows. 3. Microsoft Active Scripting Language Make R into a Microsoft Active Scripting language. Nearly every other major scripting language including perl, python, ruby, tcl, oorexx, vbscript, jscript and others have Microsoft Active Scripting support. This would allow R to be used like javascript in HTML files in Microsoft environments and also in any other software that supports Microsoft's active scripting interface. 4. Extend Clipboard Support to Non-Text Objects on Windows If one selects and copies a table in Internet Explorer (IE) one can then paste it into Excel and it comes out as expected with one Excel cell per IE table cell. However, R does not currently support this level of integration. (Current workaround is to paste it into Excel and then copy it back out of Excel. Excel will add tabs to the text that is so copied.) I understand that this feature may be in R 2.3.0 but am mentioning it for completeness. 5. Handhelds Version(s) of R for handheld computers such as Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, etc. UNIX-based handhelds would likely be simplest but the others would likely be useful to a wider audience. 6. Issue Tracking in Packages Standard method of tracking issues in CRAN packages. Provide svn and Trac support or equivalent to CRAN package authors or at least have a common change log mechanism. There is currently no uniform way of finding out what has changed in a package. 7. system The arguments of "system(...)" should be extended in various operating systems so that a consistent set is available across them. Right now it works differently under Windows and UNIX. 8. Extend Grid to Base Graphics Rework base graphics so that they use grid graphics underneath to the extent possible or else leave them as is but have a version or package that emulate them using grid graphics. 9. Eliminate Perl Get rid of all use of perl within R. The parts of R that use perl have not changed much probably because its too onerous to have to deal with a complex multilanguage setup. Eliminating perl might speed up improvements in those areas. This mostly affects the package buildin gprocess which could then be rehosted within R as a package building package. 10. Event Loop Add an event loop mechanism to facilitate GUI programming in R and also to facilitate the development of facilities to allow higher levels of interaction within grid graphics.
Wish list
8 messages · Gabor Grothendieck, Duncan Murdoch, Duncan Temple Lang +4 more
On 1/1/2006 8:47 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
This is my New Year wishlist for R features. One common thread is that I find I sometimes use languages other than R including javascript, Windows batch and gawk. Others have mentioned other languages too. It would be nice if, in those cases I could use R simplifying development into a single environment (viz. R). The following are not in any order. 1. Self Contained Executables Make it possible to create self contained R executables. Something like tcl starkits http://www.equi4.com/starkit.html or Python py2exe http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/py2exe is what I am thinking of. Its ok if they are interpreted as long as its all transparent.
How self-contained? It would be relatively easy to create small executables that could make use of the DLLs in R_HOME. But that's probably not useful if better support for your next suggestion was there. If you want something that would run on a machine with no R installed, that probably involves changing the linking scheme (at least in Windows), and would not be so simple.
2. R as a Filter
Support using R as a filter analogously to
awk/gawk. e.g.
echo a x 3 | R -f myprog.R | findstr /i answer
echo a x 3 | R -e "chartr('x', 'X', readLines(STDIN()))" | findstr /i X
This would allow replacement of certain awk/gawk
filters with R. In the above STDIN or some
would refer to the echo output, not to further
input from the script. I think /dev/stdin
can already be used in UNIX but not in Windows.
3. Microsoft Active Scripting Language
Make R into a Microsoft Active Scripting
language. Nearly every other major scripting
language including perl, python, ruby, tcl,
oorexx, vbscript, jscript and others have
Microsoft Active Scripting support. This would
allow R to be used like javascript in HTML files
in Microsoft environments and also in any other
software that supports Microsoft's active
scripting interface.
R is not designed to be secure. I think this would be a very risky thing to do.
4. Extend Clipboard Support to Non-Text Objects on Windows If one selects and copies a table in Internet Explorer (IE) one can then paste it into Excel and it comes out as expected with one Excel cell per IE table cell. However, R does not currently support this level of integration. (Current workaround is to paste it into Excel and then copy it back out of Excel. Excel will add tabs to the text that is so copied.) I understand that this feature may be in R 2.3.0 but am mentioning it for completeness.
Yes, I wrote some functions to do some of this, but I haven't committed them to the trunk. I didn't like the user interface much: using clipboard support depends heavily on being able to handle the various clipboard format constants (CF_BITMAP, etc.), and R doesn't handle constants well. I'll take another look at them and see if I get any inspiration on how to make them palatable.
5. Handhelds Version(s) of R for handheld computers such as Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, etc. UNIX-based handhelds would likely be simplest but the others would likely be useful to a wider audience.
All this needs is someone who wants to gather/create the tools and start building the binaries.
6. Issue Tracking in Packages Standard method of tracking issues in CRAN packages. Provide svn and Trac support or equivalent to CRAN package authors or at least have a common change log mechanism. There is currently no uniform way of finding out what has changed in a package. 7. system The arguments of "system(...)" should be extended in various operating systems so that a consistent set is available across them. Right now it works differently under Windows and UNIX. 8. Extend Grid to Base Graphics Rework base graphics so that they use grid graphics underneath to the extent possible or else leave them as is but have a version or package that emulate them using grid graphics.
This sounds like the gridBase package.
9. Eliminate Perl Get rid of all use of perl within R. The parts of R that use perl have not changed much probably because its too onerous to have to deal with a complex multilanguage setup. Eliminating perl might speed up improvements in those areas. This mostly affects the package buildin gprocess which could then be rehosted within R as a package building package.
10. Event Loop Add an event loop mechanism to facilitate GUI programming in R and also to facilitate the development of facilities to allow higher levels of interaction within grid graphics.
There is such a thing now: see the Writing R Extensions manual. It still needs work, but people using it and suggesting improvements will help. Duncan Murdoch
On 1/1/06, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
On 1/1/2006 8:47 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
This is my New Year wishlist for R features. One
common thread is that I find I sometimes use languages
other than R including javascript, Windows batch and
gawk. Others have mentioned other languages too. It
would be nice if, in those cases I could use R
simplifying development into a single environment
(viz. R).
The following are not in any order.
1. Self Contained Executables
Make it possible to create self contained R
executables. Something like tcl starkits
http://www.equi4.com/starkit.html
or Python py2exe
http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/py2exe
is what I am thinking of. Its ok if they
are interpreted as long as its all transparent.
How self-contained? It would be relatively easy to create small
Similar to tcl starkits and pyexe. You can just send someone an .exe and they can run it. They don't have to have any software or files other than that. Or suppose I want to write an R configuration facility and don't know which version of R is on the machine or even if R is on the machine. Currently I use batch files or javascript to do this (see http://cran.r-project.org/contrib/extra/batchfiles/) since one does not want to have configure the configurer. I would actually prefer to leverage my knowledge of R and not have to go to the lengths of using a different language.
executables that could make use of the DLLs in R_HOME. But that's probably not useful if better support for your next suggestion was there. If you want something that would run on a machine with no R installed, that probably involves changing the linking scheme (at least in Windows), and would not be so simple.
2. R as a Filter
Support using R as a filter analogously to
awk/gawk. e.g.
echo a x 3 | R -f myprog.R | findstr /i answer
echo a x 3 | R -e "chartr('x', 'X', readLines(STDIN()))" | findstr /i X
This would allow replacement of certain awk/gawk
filters with R. In the above STDIN or some
would refer to the echo output, not to further
input from the script. I think /dev/stdin
can already be used in UNIX but not in Windows.
3. Microsoft Active Scripting Language
Make R into a Microsoft Active Scripting
language. Nearly every other major scripting
language including perl, python, ruby, tcl,
oorexx, vbscript, jscript and others have
Microsoft Active Scripting support. This would
allow R to be used like javascript in HTML files
in Microsoft environments and also in any other
software that supports Microsoft's active
scripting interface.
R is not designed to be secure. I think this would be a very risky thing to do.
Some alternatives are: - restrict execution to .hta's (which are html files that are restricted to run locally -- they can't be run from a browser). - do the work to separate out the OS dependent items into libraries so that access can be restricted similarly to what vscript and jscript have done with wsh. - perhaps there is some way for the user to accept or reject such applications as trusted or not?
8. Extend Grid to Base Graphics Rework base graphics so that they use grid graphics underneath to the extent possible or else leave them as is but have a version or package that emulate them using grid graphics.
This sounds like the gridBase package.
Correct me if I am mistaken here but my understanding is that this makes it possible to use grid and standard graphics together but does not produce grobs for all the elements of a graphic like doing it from the bottom up would.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
This is my New Year wishlist for R features. One common thread is that I find I sometimes use languages other than R including javascript, Windows batch and gawk. Others have mentioned other languages too. It would be nice if, in those cases I could use R simplifying development into a single environment (viz. R). The following are not in any order. 1. Self Contained Executables Make it possible to create self contained R executables. Something like tcl starkits http://www.equi4.com/starkit.html or Python py2exe http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/py2exe is what I am thinking of. Its ok if they are interpreted as long as its all transparent.
We have been thinking of this, for me in the context of putting R on small sensor network nodes.
2. R as a Filter
Support using R as a filter analogously to
awk/gawk. e.g.
echo a x 3 | R -f myprog.R | findstr /i answer
echo a x 3 | R -e "chartr('x', 'X', readLines(STDIN()))" | findstr /i X
This would allow replacement of certain awk/gawk
filters with R. In the above STDIN or some
would refer to the echo output, not to further
input from the script. I think /dev/stdin
can already be used in UNIX but not in Windows.
This has been in the works for a long time and I still dislike two small pieces of the solution that make it limited.
3. Microsoft Active Scripting Language Make R into a Microsoft Active Scripting language. Nearly every other major scripting language including perl, python, ruby, tcl, oorexx, vbscript, jscript and others have Microsoft Active Scripting support. This would allow R to be used like javascript in HTML files in Microsoft environments and also in any other software that supports Microsoft's active scripting interface.
Yes not that hard to do given the work in other interfaces, but I wish the Windows users would contribute it.
4. Extend Clipboard Support to Non-Text Objects on Windows If one selects and copies a table in Internet Explorer (IE) one can then paste it into Excel and it comes out as expected with one Excel cell per IE table cell. However, R does not currently support this level of integration. (Current workaround is to paste it into Excel and then copy it back out of Excel. Excel will add tabs to the text that is so copied.) I understand that this feature may be in R 2.3.0 but am mentioning it for completeness. 5. Handhelds Version(s) of R for handheld computers such as Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, etc. UNIX-based handhelds would likely be simplest but the others would likely be useful to a wider audience. 6. Issue Tracking in Packages Standard method of tracking issues in CRAN packages. Provide svn and Trac support or equivalent to CRAN package authors or at least have a common change log mechanism. There is currently no uniform way of finding out what has changed in a package. 7. system The arguments of "system(...)" should be extended in various operating systems so that a consistent set is available across them. Right now it works differently under Windows and UNIX. 8. Extend Grid to Base Graphics Rework base graphics so that they use grid graphics underneath to the extent possible or else leave them as is but have a version or package that emulate them using grid graphics. 9. Eliminate Perl Get rid of all use of perl within R. The parts of R that use perl have not changed much probably because its too onerous to have to deal with a complex multilanguage setup. Eliminating perl might speed up improvements in those areas. This mostly affects the package buildin gprocess which could then be rehosted within R as a package building package.
There is some work in progress on an extensible, R-based package mechanism.
10. Event Loop Add an event loop mechanism to facilitate GUI programming in R and also to facilitate the development of facilities to allow higher levels of interaction within grid graphics.
Well, there has been work on this that people couldn't agree on. And while we are on the topic of wishlists... Generally (i.e. not directed specifically to Gabor), the suggestions are very welcome, but so are contributions. And for issues such as making the existing R available on handhelds, that is a programming task. And I draw a large distinction between programming and creative research which is based on new concepts and paradigms. The pool of people working in statistical computing research is very small. And to a large extent, their time is consumed with programming - making the same thing work on multiple platforms, correcting documentation, etc. which are good things, but not obviously the best use of available research ability and time. There are many more topics that are in progress that represent changes to what we can do rather than just to how we do the same thing. One of the reasons S (R and S-Plus) is where it is now is because in Bell Labs, the idea was to be thinking 5 years ahead and both meeting and directing the needs for the future. Because of R's popularity (somewhat related to it being free), there is an aspect of development that focuses more on software for statisticians to use "right now". Obviously, th development is a mixture of both the current and the future, but there is less of the future and certainly less of the longer term directions that is sacrificed by the need to maintain an existing system and be backward-compatible. If statistics is to fulfill its potential in this modern IT, we need new ideas and research into those new ideas. If we focus on basic programming tasks (however complex) and demand usability above concepts, we risk losing those whose primary focus is in statistical computing research from the field. While R provides statisticians and stat. comp. researchers with a terrific vehicle for doing their respective work, it also acts as a constraint for doing anything even moderately new. But much (not all) of R is based on innovations from the 1970's, 80's and 90's. And as IT evolves at a terrific pace, to keep up with it, we need to be forward looking. I'll leave it there - for the moment - and go fight off the ants that are invading my desk! While I wrote this down relatively rapidly, the ideas have been brewing for a long time. If anyone wishes to comment on the theme, I hope they will take a few minutes to think about the broad set of issues and tradeoffs. D.
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- -- Duncan Temple Lang duncan at wald.ucdavis.edu Department of Statistics work: (530) 752-4782 4210 Mathematical Sciences Building fax: (530) 752-7099 One Shields Ave. University of California at Davis Davis, CA 95616, USA -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (Darwin) iD8DBQFDt/by9p/Jzwa2QP4RAr6UAJ4mT9C1JcGwlFFJRFVDteyetDrAjACfax7B 0MpswqQE442j23WzJjqUADA= =Aq8t -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Duncan Temple Lang wrote:
And while we are on the topic of wishlists... Generally (i.e. not directed specifically to Gabor), the suggestions are very welcome, but so are contributions. And for issues such as making the existing R available on handhelds, that is a programming task.
Hasn't someone ported R to the Sharp Zaurus, for which both the Linux kernel and a more or less complete GNU toolchain exist, plus at least two GUI builders? I've forgotten what the compiler version is -- it might be back around 2.95. In any event, one of the Lisps and Maxima have been ported to the Zaurus. I'm not sure how well a number crunching application like R would run on the Zaurus processor, though -- IIRC the floating point is emulated in software. Isn't the same true for Palms and Windows CE PDAs?
And I draw a large distinction between programming and creative research which is based on new concepts and paradigms. The pool of people working in statistical computing research is very small. And to a large extent, their time is consumed with programming - making the same thing work on multiple platforms, correcting documentation, etc. which are good things, but not obviously the best use of available research ability and time. There are many more topics that are in progress that represent changes to what we can do rather than just to how we do the same thing.
I'd much rather have changes to what we can do rather than how we do the same thing! As the Perl folks say, "There's more than one way to do it!" So keep R and its contributed packages focused on making the first few ways to do something new!
One of the reasons S (R and S-Plus) is where it is now is because in Bell Labs, the idea was to be thinking 5 years ahead and both meeting and directing the needs for the future. Because of R's popularity (somewhat related to it being free), there is an aspect of development that focuses more on software for statisticians to use "right now". Obviously, th development is a mixture of both the current and the future, but there is less of the future and certainly less of the longer term directions that is sacrificed by the need to maintain an existing system and be backward-compatible. If statistics is to fulfill its potential in this modern IT, we need new ideas and research into those new ideas. If we focus on basic programming tasks (however complex) and demand usability above concepts, we risk losing those whose primary focus is in statistical computing research from the field.
Amen! Please don't turn R into Perl! The Perl community has statistical libraries for the basics. If that's all you want to do, just learn how to do it in Perl. The same goes for Python and Ruby. All the scripting languages can be used for basic statistical and numeric processing, and their communities are adding libraries for more advanced functionality all the time. But no other language/community has the breadth of advanced statistical processing that R and its contributed packages have, and no other language has the right core semantics to make this kind of computing easy, with the possible exception of the newest dialects of Fortran. I *could* write a web ecommerce site in R if I wanted to, but why would I? I'd do that in PHP or the new Ruby on Rails, because that's what those languages were designed to do well!
While R provides statisticians and stat. comp. researchers with a terrific vehicle for doing their respective work, it also acts as a constraint for doing anything even moderately new. But much (not all) of R is based on innovations from the 1970's, 80's and 90's. And as IT evolves at a terrific pace, to keep up with it, we need to be forward looking.
Could you elaborate on the nature of the constraints R imposes? Obviously there are *time* constraints made necessary by the programming tasks and finite number of community members, but are there limits to the kinds of scientific/statistical computing thoughts one can think if one only uses R and its contributed packages?
I'll leave it there - for the moment - and go fight off the ants that are invading my desk! While I wrote this down relatively rapidly, the ideas have been brewing for a long time. If anyone wishes to comment on the theme, I hope they will take a few minutes to think about the broad set of issues and tradeoffs.
I've been thinking about related issues over the holiday break, mostly triggered by Paul Graham's essay on a programming language that would last 100 years. The essay will appear on my blog in the near future. Meanwhile, I'll add my wish list (and list of things I'd work on in my spare time if I had any :) ) for R. 1. An integrated symbolic math capability. I think packaging GiNaC (http://freshmeat.net/projects/ginac/) is the logical way to do this. GiNaC is a C++ library, and I suspect it could be easily packaged, but I haven't tried it yet. If someone is ahead of me on this, I'd like to know about it before I attempt it. 2. A good solid discrete time and continuous time Markov chain analyzer for use in computer performance analysis. There are quite a few good toolsets out there, some with GUIs and some without, but nearly all of them have licenses that are not free as in speech. They're freely obtainable in the academic community, but not for "commercial use". There is one exception, and if I followed the path of integrating an existing package, I'd go with Prism (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~dxp/prism/). 3. Along the lines of 2, more "out-of-core" solver capabilities. I don't think it's going to be much longer before a "typical scientific researcher" in a domain like bioinformatics or computer performance analysis will have available a two (physical 64-bit) processor 4GB workstation with a terabyte of local disk, plus, of course, access to a grid for the "big problems." :) At the moment, I don't have any computer performance analysis problems with enough states to require an efficient out-of-core solver, but it's bound to happen.
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky http://borasky-research.blogspot.com
On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 11:08:42AM -0800, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
Hasn't someone ported R to the Sharp Zaurus,
Yes, Simon Pickering did this. I ran his version of R on a Zaurus two years ago. His site implies that development is still underway. http://people.bath.ac.uk/enpsgp/Zaurus/index.html
I'm not sure how well a number crunching application like R would run on the Zaurus processor, though -- IIRC the floating point is emulated in software.
It was slow :). Also I never got it to work with X, but in fairness I didn't really try hard. Simon's site implies that improvements are being implemented. Cheers Andrew
Andrew Robinson Senior Lecturer in Statistics Tel: +61-3-8344-9763 Department of Mathematics and Statistics Fax: +61-3-8344-4599 University of Melbourne, VIC 3010 Australia Email: a.robinson at ms.unimelb.edu.au Website: http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au
On Jan 1, 2006, at 7:36 AM, Duncan Temple Lang wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
This is my New Year wishlist for R features. One common thread is that I find I sometimes use languages other than R including javascript, Windows batch and gawk. Others have mentioned other languages too. It would be nice if, in those cases I could use R simplifying development into a single environment (viz. R). The following are not in any order. 1. Self Contained Executables Make it possible to create self contained R executables. Something like tcl starkits http://www.equi4.com/starkit.html or Python py2exe http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/py2exe is what I am thinking of. Its ok if they are interpreted as long as its all transparent.
We have been thinking of this, for me in the context of putting R on small sensor network nodes.
This was recently done with CLISP by, essentially cat'ing the image onto the end of the CLISP executable. You could probably do the same with an Rda and a startup script (since R isn't truly image based) on a small custom front end that links the DLL. You'd need to patch save and load, but you'd be able to deliver executable apps (assuming base and everything is installed). For a completely self-contained executable (i.e. not requiring an installer) you'd probably want to build a "minimal" R that you can just source in or load as an image (or we could just go to images in general.... R's been sort of meandering in that direction for the last couple of years ;-) )
2. R as a Filter
Support using R as a filter analogously to
awk/gawk. e.g.
echo a x 3 | R -f myprog.R | findstr /i answer
echo a x 3 | R -e "chartr('x', 'X', readLines(STDIN()))" |
findstr /i X
This would allow replacement of certain awk/gawk
filters with R. In the above STDIN or some
would refer to the echo output, not to further
input from the script. I think /dev/stdin
can already be used in UNIX but not in Windows.
This has been in the works for a long time and I still dislike two small pieces of the solution that make it limited.
3. Microsoft Active Scripting Language Make R into a Microsoft Active Scripting language. Nearly every other major scripting language including perl, python, ruby, tcl, oorexx, vbscript, jscript and others have Microsoft Active Scripting support. This would allow R to be used like javascript in HTML files in Microsoft environments and also in any other software that supports Microsoft's active scripting interface.
Yes not that hard to do given the work in other interfaces, but I wish the Windows users would contribute it.
No, with the DCOM stuff it should be pretty straightforward these days. We actually did a bit of this with I think it was R 1.1 or so before the Bioconductor project got started. Security was an issue as Duncan M. pointed out as I recall. You could basically remotely trash someone's drive, no good. In the end, I think you can do what you need to do with the DCOM interface and everything else you can do with a front-end. Being able to hook into .Net/Mono would be useful I think. On the Very Cool list would be a "managed" version of R, but that falls into the Things That Don't Result In Degrees so its on indefinite hold (it does give Naras and I something to talk about at coffee though).
4. Extend Clipboard Support to Non-Text Objects on Windows If one selects and copies a table in Internet Explorer (IE) one can then paste it into Excel and it comes out as expected with one Excel cell per IE table cell. However, R does not currently support this level of integration. (Current workaround is to paste it into Excel and then copy it back out of Excel. Excel will add tabs to the text that is so copied.) I understand that this feature may be in R 2.3.0 but am mentioning it for completeness. 5. Handhelds Version(s) of R for handheld computers such as Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, etc. UNIX-based handhelds would likely be simplest but the others would likely be useful to a wider audience.
Many handhelds are simply too limited. Those that aren't are usually Linux based and its just a matter of cross-compiling. Unfortunately a lot of the chips are not really suitable for floating point work. Additionally, a lot of the very limited PDAs (e.g. Coldfire-based PDAs) don't have an MMU.
6. Issue Tracking in Packages Standard method of tracking issues in CRAN packages. Provide svn and Trac support or equivalent to CRAN package authors or at least have a common change log mechanism. There is currently no uniform way of finding out what has changed in a package. 7. system The arguments of "system(...)" should be extended in various operating systems so that a consistent set is available across them. Right now it works differently under Windows and UNIX. 8. Extend Grid to Base Graphics Rework base graphics so that they use grid graphics underneath to the extent possible or else leave them as is but have a version or package that emulate them using grid graphics. 9. Eliminate Perl Get rid of all use of perl within R. The parts of R that use perl have not changed much probably because its too onerous to have to deal with a complex multilanguage setup. Eliminating perl might speed up improvements in those areas. This mostly affects the package buildin gprocess which could then be rehosted within R as a package building package.
There is some work in progress on an extensible, R-based package mechanism.
10. Event Loop Add an event loop mechanism to facilitate GUI programming in R and also to facilitate the development of facilities to allow higher levels of interaction within grid graphics.
Well, there has been work on this that people couldn't agree on. And while we are on the topic of wishlists... Generally (i.e. not directed specifically to Gabor), the suggestions are very welcome, but so are contributions. And for issues such as making the existing R available on handhelds, that is a programming task. And I draw a large distinction between programming and creative research which is based on new concepts and paradigms. The pool of people working in statistical computing research is very small. And to a large extent, their time is consumed with programming - making the same thing work on multiple platforms, correcting documentation, etc. which are good things, but not obviously the best use of available research ability and time. There are many more topics that are in progress that represent changes to what we can do rather than just to how we do the same thing. One of the reasons S (R and S-Plus) is where it is now is because in Bell Labs, the idea was to be thinking 5 years ahead and both meeting and directing the needs for the future. Because of R's popularity (somewhat related to it being free), there is an aspect of development that focuses more on software for statisticians to use "right now". Obviously, th development is a mixture of both the current and the future, but there is less of the future and certainly less of the longer term directions that is sacrificed by the need to maintain an existing system and be backward-compatible. If statistics is to fulfill its potential in this modern IT, we need new ideas and research into those new ideas. If we focus on basic programming tasks (however complex) and demand usability above concepts, we risk losing those whose primary focus is in statistical computing research from the field. While R provides statisticians and stat. comp. researchers with a terrific vehicle for doing their respective work, it also acts as a constraint for doing anything even moderately new. But much (not all) of R is based on innovations from the 1970's, 80's and 90's. And as IT evolves at a terrific pace, to keep up with it, we need to be forward looking. I'll leave it there - for the moment - and go fight off the ants that are invading my desk! While I wrote this down relatively
Yes, Winter (such as it is around here) has arrived hasn't it? :-)
rapidly, the ideas have been brewing for a long time. If anyone wishes to comment on the theme, I hope they will take a few minutes to think about the broad set of issues and tradeoffs. D.
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- -- Duncan Temple Lang duncan at wald.ucdavis.edu Department of Statistics work: (530) 752-4782 4210 Mathematical Sciences Building fax: (530) 752-7099 One Shields Ave. University of California at Davis Davis, CA 95616, USA -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (Darwin) iD8DBQFDt/by9p/Jzwa2QP4RAr6UAJ4mT9C1JcGwlFFJRFVDteyetDrAjACfax7B 0MpswqQE442j23WzJjqUADA= =Aq8t -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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--- Byron Ellis (ellis at stat.harvard.edu) "Oook" -- The Librarian
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