The hidden costs of GPL software?

Tim Cutts schrieb:

Any GUI to R could (and should) be able to store the command line 
equivalent to what it has just done, to satisfy the reproducible 
criterion above, but I suspect it could still lead to some pretty shoddy 
work being done by careless and lazy scientists, and we get enough of 
that already.

In that respect you should have a look at Emacs/XEmacs/ESS package. 
This package combines the power of command line and reproducibility of 
what has been done to generate graphs or whatever you like. Its also 
equipped with a nice ref-card-pdf which is very helpful to learn 
common shortcuts to increase your productivity levels. I wouldn't call 
ESS necessarily a GUI in a traditional sense, though.


When I started using R I was inclined to use the RCommander-GUI. After 
fiddling with this for a while I came to the conclusion that its 
possibilities are, at least for the moment, really limited. 
Furthermore some things increased my irritation levels, i.e. 
orientation to push the correct buttons to achieve a specific task. If 
I hit a false button I hardly wasn't able to find out what actually 
went wrong.

Nevertheless, for me as a beginner in GNU R, who never used S before, 
but primarily SPSS and BMDP in early times, it is a long way to gain 
some control of advanced aspects of using R. This is also true despite 
the fact that I took statistics courses for several years and do have 
experiences in research projects (social sciences and epidemiology), 
so I'll would agree that using GNU R has some hidden costs for me!

To sum up, what I am in need to is an extensive example based 
help-system, focused on how to do things in R. In parts this is 
already there, i.e. SimpleR from Verzani (contributed docs area) etc.

Hopefully I can  contribute to this in future, since it is seems to me 
invaluable to learn R by going through example-based lessons (some are 
found in vignette() ).
These are much more comprehensible to me than those short reference 
like entries in the current help-system, mostly due to their very 
technical approach (same is to be said about the official GNU R 
manuals, especially "The R Language", which wasn't a great help for me 
when I took my first look at GNU R). In this context something like 
the GuideMaps of Vista come to my mind!

But to be as clear as possible, I think GNU R is great and I 
appreciate all the efforts done by the R core team and associates!

Nevertheless it seems to be valuable to re-think the help-system in R 
with respect to those who may have a good understanding in statistics, 
but lacking some basic experiences in how to introduce themselves to 
sophisticated world of R/S languages.



Regards

Thomas