[R] Problems in Recommending R

Adam D. I. Kramer adik at ilovebacon.org
Mon Feb 2 22:05:35 CET 2009


On Tue, 3 Feb 2009, Rolf Turner wrote:

> I think the R website is just fine as it is.  Effort should be put into
> content and not into cosmetics.  Those (potential) users who would be
> likely to be influenced by such trivialities as the appearance of the web
> page are unlikely to be the sort of people who would use R anyway.

I respectfully disagree. In my repeated experience, I have seen colleagues
in industry and university simply write R off as "too difficult" or "not
worth the effort" based on purely cosmetic grounds, and then at my urging
and after some instruction embrace R as being a fantastic piece of software.

The reality of the situation is that before you read a book, you only have
its cover to judge. Suggesting that people should read every book regardless
of the cover does not make sense for people who have other things to do.

In the ecological context of open-source software, the "cover" or cosmetics
of a software program, its documentation, and its support structure are
actually quite correlated with overall ease of use, and if functionality is
modeled as the factorial interaction of "information produced" with "the
amount of time it takes to produce the information," then functionality
correlates with ease of use, and so the appearance of the webpage is not a
"triviality."

Cordially,
--
Adam D. I. Kramer
Ph.D. Student, Social Psychology
University of Oregon




More information about the R-help mailing list