The Origins of R AND CALCULUS
Peter Dalgaard wrote:
This of course does not mean that the current R should not acknowledge its substantial S heritage, just that if you want to describe the early history of R accurately, you do need to choose your words rather more carefully.
Point taken, Peter. But I wan't trying to give an accurate portrayal of the origins of R. That was Mr. Vance's obligation. I was attempting to show how easy it would be for someone who is a writer by profession to make reasonable, and proper, reference to R's "substantial S heritage...," as you yourself put it. And that, really, I feel, is the point.
Peter Dalgaard wrote:
Mark Difford wrote:
It would have been very easy for Mr. Vance to have written: John M. Chambers, a former Bell Labs researcher who is now a consulting professor of statistics at Stanford University, was an early champion. At Bell Labs, Mr. Chambers had helped develop S, THE PROTOTYPE OF R, which was meant to give researchers of all stripes an accessible data analysis tool.
...except that it would be wrong in about as many ways. (In fact,
referring to S (v.3) as "the prototype" was an internal R Core joke for
quite a while.) Two major points:
- S-PLUS was at the time a strong commercial product, not a prototype of
anything, and calling it that would be disrespectful to quite a few
people working for and with StatSci/Insightful/TIBCO and their
international distributors, as well as the Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies
group. It couldn't touch the "dinosaurs" SAS and SPSS, but it did reach
a level of more than 100000 licenced users. It took several years for R
to get to a credibility level where it was even known outside some
narrow academic circles.
- S compatibility was not a primary goal of R. The original plan was for
a Scheme-like language with "syntactic sugar" making in "not unlike" S.
The potential for running existing S scripts with minimal modifications
drove R much closer to S than originally anticipated. This of course
does not mean that the current R should not acknowledge its substantial
S heritage, just that if you want to describe the early history of R
accurately, you do need to choose your words rather more carefully.
--
O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard ?ster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
(*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk) FAX: (+45) 35327907
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