Do you use R for data manipulation?

My institute uses SAS religiously, I am the only R "heathen".

I have resisted learning to use SAS because I dont see the point after 
years of using R and I like being able to do everything using one 
program. However, my colleagues maintain that SAS is "better" for 
programming without really ever giving me a good reason why other than 
memory issues.

dont want to hi-jack the thread but would be interested in hearing some 
other views, especially since my organisation spends (wastes?) alot of 
money every year on SAS licences...

Simon.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Laura Arsanto" <ghina84 at hotmail.it>
To: <jrkrideau at yahoo.ca>; <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>; <fjbuch at gmail.com>
Cc: <ross.lazarus at gmail.com>; <gregory_warnes at urmc.rochester.edu>; 
<greg at warnes.net>
Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 2:53 PM
Subject: Re: [R] Do you use R for data manipulation?




I used R for my master thesis (with big effort, anyway) and now I find 
difficult to use R in my daily work, becasue it has really serious 
problems with datasets of big dimension, both in the data manipulation 
step and in the analysis step.

But I really would love to use it, as I like its transparence, compared 
to other software.

Laura

***********

Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 06:42:45 -0700
From: jrkrideau at yahoo.ca
To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch; fjbuch at gmail.com
CC: ross.lazarus at gmail.com; gregory_warnes at urmc.rochester.edu; 
greg at warnes.net
Subject: Re: [R] Do you use R for data manipulation?




--- On Wed, 5/6/09, Farrel Buchinsky <fjbuch at gmail.com> wrote:

Is R an appropriate tool for data
manipulation and data reshaping and data
organizing? I think so but someone who recently joined our
group thinks not.

I only do small scale projects and am by no means a programmer. Isn't 
Perl something for earings?

That said, I find R to be extremely useful at data manipulation and 
have used it exclusively in my last three projects.  The different 
data structures alone are worth their weight in gold, if for nothing 
else than making it harder to make stupid mistakes in coding.

The new recruit believes that python or another language is
a far better tool for developing data manipulation scripts that can be
then used by> several members of our research group. Her assessment is
that R is useful> only when it comes to data analysis and working with
statistical models.

Any reason that she thinks this?  How well does she know R?  It is not 
exactly a language that one picks up in a week, especially if one is 
coming from using a stats package like SAS or SPSS. As an ex-SAS and 
SYSTAT user it took me weeks to just get comfortable with the power of 
subscripting and the ability to do all kinds of calculations "in-line".

So what do you think:
1)R is a phenomenally powerful and flexible tool and since you are 

going >  > to do analyses in R you might as well use it to read data 
in and merge

it and reshape it to whatever you need.

Definately. I am not a computer scientist or a statistician. I usually 
am working as a single contractor and normally with small datasets as 
part of a larger project.  R does what I want, usually very elegantly 
(albeit perhaps after a lot of headbanging and calls for help to the 
R-list) and it would be stupid for me to use more than one language 
when it is not needed.

Another plus is that I can  easily leave my data analysis work and a 
working copy of R with the client.  He/she may have a problem seeing 
what I did but it is clearly readable & replicable by either the 
client or another consultant.

OR
2) Are you crazy? Nobody in their right mind uses R to pipe
the data around their lab and assemble it for analysis.

Well I don't work in a lab but why complicate things? If everyone is 
using the same tools then you have a good situation.  Others who do 
work in labs can address this point more cogently

From a personnel point of view do you expect everyone in the lab to 

be >proficient with R and, for example, Perl? What happens when/if you 
lose >your Perl expert(s)?  I've had occasions where I waited a week 
for data >simply because the division's MS Access "expert" was on 
holiday and the >only other "Access" person there only knew how to 
enter data and run the >monthly reports.  Anything more complicated 
required the "expert".