help: R on Mac's is "buggy", department reconsidering

Matt,
  In addition to the comments by Kasper and Max, may I add two points:

1) I am delighted that another psych department is pushing R for
undergrads and grads.  I have been doing so here with limited success.
I have been able to get undergrads in both my research methods class
and a more advanced class getting comfortable with it and doing some
basic analyses.  Some of our grad students are R converts as well.
Among the faculty, however, it is much slower going.

2) Running R 2.6.1 with Mac 10.4+ or 10.5.1  on Intel and G4/G5s  and
the Mac Gui I have almost no crashes of R.  Running 2.7.0
(development, unstable) I have just a few.

Make sure the students download 2.6.1 and packages that come with
that configuration.

Bill







At 9:23 AM -0800 1/31/08, Kasper Daniel Hansen wrote:

Let me preempt Simon a bit and suggest that you give us very precise
information about what happens. Especially these days since "Mac"
actually covers 4 different architectures, several versions of the OS
and several compilers.

So
1) Get a crash report and send it to Simon. If it is so easy to get R
to crash it should be easy to get a report.
2) What version of R and the GUI was installed and exactly on what
machine? How did you install packages? Which compiler was used
(include gcc version and build number)?

Kasper

On Jan 31, 2008, at 8:40 AM, Matthew Keller wrote:

 Hello all,

 I dread writing this because it may come across as being ungrateful to
 the hard work of those (esp. Simon Urbanek) who have made an otherwise
 fantastic R interface for the mac. Nevertheless...

 I do most of my work in R using Aquamacs and had, until recently,
 little interaction with the R Gui. People in my department (psychology
 at CU Boulder) are mainly mac users, and a few of us (including the
 chair and the statistics professors) are making a push to make our
 department an "R" department (such that it is the package taught to
 undergrads and grad students). I have been teaching a four week intro
 to the R language this semester to students, postdocs, and faculty,
 and the undergrad stats professors have taken the leap and are
 teaching R in the undergrad stats classes this semester. So far so
 good... but...

 There is beginning to be a backlash, not from what I had expected ("R
 is too user unfriendly"... this doesn't seem to come up!), but rather
 that R is "too buggy" and crashes too often. Since switching to the R
 Gui to teach this class, I myself have had R crash several times
 (previously a rare occurrence when I used Aquamacs). I cannot find a
 rhyme or reason to when it happens. The students/colleagues in my
 class who are mac users also complain about it (none of the windows
 users have). And this morning, an email went out from one of the
 undergrad stats teachers who said much the same thing (see his email
 below).

 Being one of the people who really pushed for this switch to R, I hate
 to see it go down in flames because of this. I have considered trying
 to teach using R via Aquamacs, but this presents its own set of
 difficulties.

 Does anyone out there who has experience with the R Gui for Macs have
 any suggestions re making it more stable? Are there steps we can take
 or advice we can give to students that would lessen the number of
 crashes we are experiencing? Might the crashes be due to the newness
 of the Leopard OS, etc?

 I apologize for breaking the listserve rules - I have not given a good
 explanation of the conditions under which these crashes occur. I could
 try to get the students to document exactly when they happen and send
 a summary back out to the list if this would be helpful.

 I really want this (our department's switch to R) to go through, but I
 am afraid the "bugginess of R" may be jeopardizing this. Any help
 > would be most appreciated. And as I said before, thank you to the
 people who have selflessly spent their time making the R Gui - I
 wouldn't even know where to start! Best,

 Matt



 <message from an undergrad stats prof here at CU> :

 In the labs for my course, the R GUI has been buggy - i.e. will
 crash at
 random times. I thought this had to do with using R Commander, but
 after
 looking into it further, it has nothing to do with R Commander -
 when I
 ran through some of the tutorial/homework for my course using the R
 GUI
 (rather than R Commander) the crashes were still there.  I also
 thought
 it might have to do with computing labs (perhaps installing ALL R
 packages created the problem), but a quick survey in my course
 suggested
 that people's personal apple computers are experiencing the same
 thing.
 Greg and Matt Keller also mentioned to me that some of their students
 were having issues with the R GUI on Mac OS X. As everyone knows,
 there
 are A LOT of Mac users in the undergrad student body.

 As far as I can tell (after discussing with Matt Keller), it has
 nothing
 to do with the R "engine" - it's all about the R GUI interface (for
 example, I've never had a problem submitting R jobs in pseudo-batch
 mode).  I get slightly less buggy-ness on my Mac (intel dual-core,
 Leopard), but there are still some issues.

 Anyway, no real action items here other than to note that it
 appears to
 be fairly common. The students are tolerating it, and I just keep
 telling them that it's "free" and "free" always comes at a price. If
 anyone has stumbled a more stable configuration, please let me know!



 --
 Matthew C Keller
 Asst. Professor of Psychology
 University of Colorado at Boulder
 www.matthewckeller.com

--
William Revelle         http://personality-project.org/revelle.html
Professor                       http://personality-project.org/personality.html
Department of Psychology             http://www.wcas.northwestern.edu/psych/
Northwestern University http://www.northwestern.edu/
Use R for statistics:                          http://personality-project.org/r