Message-ID: <p06100500bdc27e59020e@[83.132.28.34]>
Date: 2004-11-18T16:39:47Z
From: Tiago R Magalhaes
Subject: The hidden costs of GPL software?
In-Reply-To: <200411181106.iAIB6XI2020702@hypatia.math.ethz.ch>
My background:
I am a biologist coming to R via Bioconductor. I have no computer
background in computer sciences and only basic undergraduate training
level in statistics.
I have used R with great pleasure and great pains. The most difficult
thing is to know what functions to use - sometimes I know that one
function is most likely available, but there's really no easy way to
get it (yes, even going to the archives and reading the help files).
I feel that more examples in the help files would definitely be a
good way to fully understand the potencial of the functions. I know
how difficult this is to do and how much of a time sink it must be.
One thing I defeinitely think would be a great improvement is to have
a beefed up Object Explorer as Splus does. I think it's the great
advantage of Splus when compared to R is to have much easier access
to what type of object, col names, classes and so on there are. And
how much easier it is to change all these attributes in Splus. I
think R 2.0 in Mac did a lot to improve this, but I think that for
someone that very frequently needs to know whether the object created
turned out to be a vector or a list, the easy access to objects is
very, very, very important and would be a great improvement in the
ease of use of R.