[R] History of R

[Kathy Gerber]

Thanks to all who responded so thoughtfully.  I would like to summarize 
briefly the observations and opinions so far with some of my own 
interpretations and thoughts.  John Fox is working on a much deeper 
history scheduled for August, and his three factors are a good starting 
point.

John Fox wrote:
> Dear Kathy,
>
> As Achim has mentioned, I've been doing interviews with members of the R
> Core team and with some other people central to the R Project. Although I
> haven't entirely organized and finished reflecting on this material, the
> following factors come immediately to mind:
>
> (1) Doug has already mentioned the personal and technical talents of the
> original developers, and their generosity in opening up development to a
> Core group and in making R open source. To that I would add the collective
> talents of the Core group as a whole.
>   
There are three attributes here:
a) Personal talent:  I take this to mean communication and teaching 
ability along with leadership.  These are the talents and skills that 
provide groundwork for a mature type of collaboration, more along the 
lines found in tightly focused academic areas.  I would think that these 
attributes are  big factors in why R has not devolved into forks and 
holy wars.
b) Technical talent: Both the technical talent and domain knowledge of 
the original developers and the R Core group are better than 
consistently solid.  The leaders are not rock stars or cult figures.
c) Generosity:  The responses themselves sincerely gave credit to 
others.  While this may appear to be consistent with Eric Raymond's 
notions of open source as built upon a "gift culture," I haven't really 
seen this going on elsewhere at such a level.
> (2) R implements the S language, which already was in wide use, and which
> has many attractive features (each of use, etc.).
>
>   
One person who emailed privately pointed out that many open source 
projects are "knock-offs," e.g., linux itself is a unix knock-off.  I 
believe the point is that R is not a totally new approach or invention, 
rather it is based upon advancing some product or collection of ideas 
that are already in place.
> (3) The R package system and the establishment of CRAN allowed literally
> hundreds of developers to contribute to the broader R Project. More
> generally, the Core group worked to integrate users into the R Project,
> e.g., through R News, the r-help list (though naive users aren't always
> treated gently there), and the useR conferences.
>
>   
Again, this is another distinctive feature, perhaps not in concept but 
in degree and level of actual success thanks to good planning.  Like so 
many other points, this goes back to the leadership.

Another point made was the need or demand for such an application.   Yet 
another was the planning that goes into avoiding breakage of packages.  
What no one mentioned though was the idea of standards. 

Finally, in comparing with Octave, it was mentioned that Octave may be 
stuck in a position of playing catch-up to Matlab. 

What I have here is far from complete, but I did want to give some 
feedback tonight.  Again, thanks to you all for such articulate 
responses, and I will point to my slides, and later on write up a summary.

Kathy Gerber