From rlevy at ucsd.edu  Wed Jan  7 15:40:20 2009
From: rlevy at ucsd.edu (Roger Levy)
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:40:20 -0800
Subject: [R-lang] New York Times article
Message-ID: <49653D64.5020606@ucsd.edu>

I just want to draw everyone's attention to the fact that an article
about R is currently the seventh most emailed story at the New York
Times website!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html?em


-- 

Roger Levy                      Email: rlevy at ling.ucsd.edu
Assistant Professor             Phone: 858-534-7219
Department of Linguistics       Fax:   858-534-4789
UC San Diego                    Web:   http://ling.ucsd.edu/~rlevy


From wjposer at ldc.upenn.edu  Wed Jan  7 16:36:34 2009
From: wjposer at ldc.upenn.edu (William J Poser)
Date: Wed,  7 Jan 2009 19:36:34 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [R-lang] New York Times article
In-Reply-To: <49653D64.5020606@ucsd.edu>
Message-ID: <20090108003634.B23F2B2437@lorax.ldc.upenn.edu>

It is nice to see that article, but I was a little disappointed
in the failure of the article to explain accurately the relationship
between R and S and thereby passes over the vision of the creators
of S. It mentions S, but gives the impression that S
was just something vaguely similar.  It doesn't explain that R
began as a reimplementation of S(+), and that although S was not
open source, it had much of the flexibility of open source because
it provided a flexible language in which one could write pretty
much anything. (Also, since at least in academic environments,
S was supplied as source, which you had to compile (and compile, and
compile...)  yourself, although you couldn't freely redistribute it,
you could in fact read the source and modify it if you liked.)

Bill