The Origins of R AND CALCULUS

An amusing afterthought : What is a rival software (ahem!) was planting
this, hoping for a divide between S and R communities.or at the very
minimum
hoping for some amusement. an assumption or even a pretense of stealing
credit is one of the easiest ways of sparking intellectual discord
Most users of softwares don't really care about who gets credit ( Who
wrote
Windows Vista ,or Mac OS or Ubuntu Linux), and the NYT is a newspaper not
a
journal.

Does any student, or teacher for that matter care whether Newton or
Leibntiz
invented calculas.

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Mark Difford
<mark_difford at yahoo.co.uk>wrote:

I think that all appeared on January 8 in Vance's blog posting, with a
comment on it by David M Smith on Jan 9.  So those people have -27

days

Then there was no need for vituperative comments (not from you, of
course):
simply point doubters to the right place, as you have done. But Mr.
Vance's
comments only deepen the "mystery."

If Mr. Vance was aware of the true origins of R, why did he choose to
misrepresent them in his article, which is what got the publicity and
which
is the item that most people saw/read? Most right-thinking people don't,
wouldn't, or haven't taken the matter further than that. Their
criticisms,
as mine have been, have been aimed at the NY Times and Mr. Vance's lack
of
ethics. It also seems clear from Mr. Vance's comments that there was no
editorial or sub-editorial meddling.

The knee-jerk reaction ? Well, it is almost amusing to see how sensitive
some very hard-nosed individuals on this list can be, or have become.

Regards, Mark.

still to wait.

Duncan Murdoch-2 wrote:

On 2/4/2009 3:53 PM, Mark Difford wrote:

Indeed.  The postings exuded a tabloid-esque level of slimy

 nastiness.

Hi Rolf,

It is good to have clarification, for you wrote "..,the postings...,"
tarring everyone with the same brush. And it was quite a nasty brush.

It

also is conjecture that "this was due to an editor or sub-editor,"

i.e.

the
botched article.

I think that what some people are waiting for are factual statements

from

the parties concerned. Conjecture is, well, little more than

conjecture.

I think that all appeared on January 8 in Vance's blog posting, with a
comment on it by David M Smith on Jan 9.  So those people have -27 days
still to wait.

Duncan Murdoch

Regards, Mark.


Rolf Turner-3 wrote:

On 4/02/2009, at 8:15 PM, Mark Difford wrote:

Indeed.  The postings exuded a tabloid-esque level of slimy
nastiness.

Indeed, indeed. But I do not feel that that is necessarily the
case. Credit
should be given where credit is due. And that, I believe is the
issue that
is getting (some) people hot and bothered. Certainly, Trevor Hastie
in his
reply to the NY Times article, was not too happy with this aspect
of the
story.

Granted, his comments were not made on this list, but the objection

is

essentially the same. I would not call what he had to say "Mischief
making"
or smacking of a "tabloid-esque level of slimy nastiness." The knee-
jerk
reaction seems to be that this is a criticism of R. It is not. It is

a

criticism of a poorly researched article.

It also is an undeniable and inescapable fact that most S code runs
in R.

The problem is not with criticism of the NY Times article, although
as Pat
Burns and others have pointed out this criticism was somewhat
misdirected
and unrealistic considering the exigencies of newspaper editing.  The
problem
was with a number of posts that cast aspersions upon the integrity of
Ihaka and Gentleman.  It is these posts that exuded tabloid-esque

slimy

nastiness.

I am sure that Ross and Robert would never dream of failing to give
credit
where credit is due and it is almost certainly the case that they
explained
the origins of R in the S language to the writer of the NYT article
(wherefrom
the explanation was cut in the editing process).

Those of us on this list (with the possible exception of one or two
nutters)
would take it that it goes without saying that R was developed on the
basis
of S --- we all ***know*** that.  To impugn the integrity of Ihaka
and Gentleman,
because an article which *they didn't write* failed to mention this
fact, is
unconscionable.

    cheers,

            Rolf Turner

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An amusing afterthought : What is a rival software (ahem!) was planting
this, hoping for a divide between S and R communities.or at the very minimum
hoping for some amusement. an assumption or even a pretense of stealing
credit is one of the easiest ways of sparking intellectual discord
Most users of softwares don't really care about who gets credit ( Who wrote
Windows Vista ,or Mac OS or Ubuntu Linux), and the NYT is a newspaper not a
journal.

Does any student, or teacher for that matter care whether Newton or Leibntiz
invented calculas.

  

Ajay ohri wrote:
An amusing afterthought : What is a rival software (ahem!) was planting
this, hoping for a divide between S and R communities.or at the very minimum
hoping for some amusement. an assumption or even a pretense of stealing
credit is one of the easiest ways of sparking intellectual discord
Most users of softwares don't really care about who gets credit ( Who wrote
Windows Vista ,or Mac OS or Ubuntu Linux), and the NYT is a newspaper not a
journal.

Does any student, or teacher for that matter care whether Newton or Leibntiz
invented calculas.

If you have bug reports for a contributed package please take them up with

not the list.

Wacek,

If you have bug reports for a contributed package please take them up with
the maintainer, not the list.

       -thomas


On Thu, 5 Feb 2009, Wacek Kusnierczyk wrote:

Ajay ohri wrote:
An amusing afterthought : What is a rival software (ahem!) was planting
this, hoping for a divide between S and R communities.or at the very
minimum
hoping for some amusement. an assumption or even a pretense of stealing
credit is one of the easiest ways of sparking intellectual discord
Most users of softwares don't really care about who gets credit ( Who
wrote
Windows Vista ,or Mac OS or Ubuntu Linux), and the NYT is a newspaper not
a
journal.

Does any student, or teacher for that matter care whether Newton or
Leibntiz
invented calculas.

supposed to be funny?  type citation() in r, you'll read:

"We have invested a lot of time and effort in creating R, please cite it
when using it for data analysis. See also ?citation("pkgname")? for
citing R packages."

why care whether newton or leibnitz invented calculus?  why care who has
invested a lot of time and effort in this or that?

vQ

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.

Does any student, or teacher for that matter care whether Newton or 

invented calculas.

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.

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.

-- 
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