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off-topic question: Latex and R in industries

9 messages · Wensui Liu, Roger Koenker, A.J. Rossini +5 more

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Latex and R are really cool stuff. I am just wondering how they are
used in industry. But based on my own experience, very rare. Why?

How about the opinion of other listers? Thanks.
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my favorite answer to this question is "because there is no one to sue."

url:	www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger        	Roger Koenker
email	rkoenker at uiuc.edu			Department of Economics
vox: 	217-333-4558				University of Illinois
fax:   	217-244-6678				Champaign, IL 61820
On Apr 6, 2005, at 10:38 AM, Wensui Liu wrote:

            
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Ha -- that's a good one, Roger.

Which demonstrates that most industrial people don't bother to read EULA's :-).

(of course, it depends on which industry, and for some industries,
which segment you are in ).
On Apr 6, 2005 6:05 PM, roger koenker <rkoenker at uiuc.edu> wrote:

  
    
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On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 11:38 -0400, Wensui Liu wrote:
As Tony has referenced, the answer will depend upon what industry you
are referring to.

There is an article in R News (2004 Vol 4 Number 1) that you might find
of interest entitled "The Decision to Use R" from a small medical
consulting business perspective:

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2004-1.pdf

There is a persistent rumor of a similar article from a large corporate
medical industry environment that is due "real soon now"...  ;-)

You might also want to search the r-help archives as there have been
some fairly "lively" discussions on this in the recent past, especially
in healthcare applications when a certain other Statistical Analysis
System is referenced as being the perceived standard...

HTH,

Marc
I use R. My company benefits from it. My clients benefit from it.
...and I sleep just fine (when I do sleep)... :-)
   -- Marc Schwartz, Medanalytics (about the `costs' of free software)
      R-help (June 2004)
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We have S+ at our company, but I choose to use R because I like it. 
There are two observations I have.  One is that many people in IT
don't seem to like open source software that much because either they
don't trust it or they say there is no one who stands behind it. 
Second, equally important point, is that there is no R salesforce
marking the product to companies.  Commercial products have marketing
budgets and aggresive salespeople who contact potential purchasers. 
Insightful will come in and give a company presentation.  Who wants to
volunteer to come into my company and demo R for my manager?  I only
learned about R a year ago when a friend of mine told me about it. 
The real question is, how to get more exposuRe?


Thanks,

Roger
On Apr 6, 2005 2:09 PM, Marc Schwartz <MSchwartz at medanalytics.com> wrote:
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Thank you all for the replies.

I've used R and latex in graduate school and absolultely love them.
After getting in the industry, everyone is using MS products or
SPSS/SAS. But in term of quality, there is no comparison between MS
word and Latex or between SAS/SPSS and R.
On Apr 6, 2005 2:35 PM, roger bos <roger.bos at gmail.com> wrote:

  
    
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On Wed, 6 Apr 2005, roger bos wrote:
The other real question is "Why?".  I can see the motivation of people who 
want to use R and need to convince their management that it is safe, but 
inflicting R on people who haven't heard of it and are perfectly happy 
that way seems unnecessary.  What would be the benefit?

 	-thomas
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On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 11:56:59AM -0700, Thomas Lumley wrote:
Of course, it follows from the assumption of perfect happiness without
R that there's no point in forcibly selling R to them. I suspect that the
salesforces behind commercial software are not exclusively driven by such
reason, however...

Best regards, Jan
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Thomas Lumley wrote:

            
Actually, I see it as part of my job to inflict R on people who are 
perfectly
happy to have never heard of it.  Happiness  doesn't equal proficient and
efficient.  In some cases the proficiency of a person serves a greater good
than their momentary happiness.

Patrick Burns

Burns Statistics
patrick at burns-stat.com
+44 (0)20 8525 0696
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")