R Documentation(s)

Dear all,

Many thanks for the replies to my yesterday's message. I'm still waiting
for more opinions to try to synthesize the major ideas. Surprisingly to me,
there are few reactions from the R Development Core Team. Brian Ripley
pointed out that an R language manual is in progress.

We've been writing software _and_ doing our day jobs (at least, I have:
writing a data editor for Windows needs a lot of concentration, but is
99% done for 1.1.x).

We (R-core) do need to keep thinking about documentation.  As Bill Venables
pointed out here, documnentation is hard wortk (and our two joint books
certainly were), and it should not be surprising that we (Bill and I)
prefer to do this commercially (and a Japanese translation of MASS is
apparently a couple of months off).  Not that is all we do: we are both
major contributors to the R documentation.

The trouble is, there are so many different target audiences. S-notes
(which became R notes and R-intro) was written by Bill for statistics
majors.  For me it did too little statistics, and I wrote some
complementary notes.  The two became MASS after a lot of added value from
two minds and approaches.  Neither of us teach introductory statistics, and
we need people who do to prepare suitable material.  Doug Bates has
pointed out one approach, to give an R slant on a standard text.

I suspect it is time again to point out that R is a collaborative project.
R-core are uniquely well placed to think about internal stategic issues
(like memory managers) and to write the definitive reference material, but
generically we are not especially well placed to write beginner's
documentation.  Indeed, most other experiences (S for one) shows that 3rd
parties often have an advantage there.  So my (and I think our)  
dream/hope is that the users will write what they see the need of.  We
(at least I) would be happy to cast an eye over, comment, amend, ....
(Again, Bill and I have benefited from lots of expert/student readers
over the years, and some S books show the lack of this.)

Brian Ripley

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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