[R] Making a case for using R in Academia

[Spencer Graves]

      I haven't followed this thread, but I suggest you not judge solely 
from current and past usage, because I think R's market share is 
increasing everywhere, and it's increasing the fastest in two groups: 

      (1) People who are price sensitive, e.g., the professors in New 
Zealand who produced the first prototype of R. 

      (2) People involved in new algorithm development:  R is the 
language of choice for a rapidly growing group of people involved in new 
algorithm development.  If I see software that does something similar to 
what I want, if it's in R, I can get the source, walk through it line by 
line to see what it does and quickly modify it to see if my idea seems 
to work in my application.  For commercial software, I've got to start 
from scratch.  This increases the work required to learn and modify 
something by at least an order of magnitude. 

      Because of this latter point, I now look for an "R companion" for 
technical books and articles I read:  I will learn more, faster if R 
code exists than if it doesn't. 

      Bottom line:  You need to prepare your students for the future, 
not the past. 

      Hope this helps. 
      Spencer Graves    

Doran, Harold wrote:
> I would turn this on its head. The problem with social science grad
> schools is that students are not expected to know R. In my org doing
> psychometrics, we won't even consider an applicant if they only know
> SPSS. 
>
>   
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
>> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of 
>> Charilaos Skiadas
>> Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2006 11:18 AM
>> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
>> Subject: Re: [R] Making a case for using R in Academia
>>
>> As a addendum to all this, this is one of the responses I got 
>> from one of my colleagues:
>>
>> "The problem with R is that our students in many social science  
>> fields, are expected to know SPSS when they go to graduate school.   
>> Not having a background in SPSS would put these students at a 
>> disadvantage."
>>
>> Is this really the case? Does anyone have any such statistics?
>>
>> Charilaos Skiadas
>> Department of Mathematics
>> Hanover College
>> P.O.Box 108
>> Hanover, IN 47243
>>
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>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>>     
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>