[R] general question on Spotfire

Frank Harrell f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu
Thu Jan 12 17:38:19 CET 2012


As a slight aside, Tibco/Spotfire originally planned to provide a capability
to load R packages into S-Plus.  This always seemed to me to be a hard thing
to do, and if my understanding is correct, this proved to be too difficult
to do in S-Plus, at  least for large packages such as mine.
Frank

Terry Therneau-2 wrote
> 
> John,
>   Spotfire is a menu driven data exploration tool, very popular here
> with biologists who found that their previous Excel based approach
> doesn't cut it for large data sets.  When TIBCO wanted to expand the
> tool with further quantitative features they made (I think) a bright
> decision to purchase S-plus and integrate it as a back end, rather than
> try to write dozens of new modules in house.  The "Splus vs R" aspect of
> the list responses misses the main point, however.  
> 
> Spotfire is designed to let you nose around in a data set, quickly
> plotting various aspects, zoom in on subsets (imagine a mouse based
> version of the "pinch" metafor used on the iphone), etc.  It is a useful
> and very well designed tool; one demo was enough to make the sale and
> early growth here was explosive.  But if you already know R you can do
> those graphs already, albeit quite a bit slower.  I decided not to
> persue proficiency in Spotfire, but that was partly because it's Windows
> based and I prefer Unix.  Also most of my work is at the
> post-exploration phase, and I would have flipped back to straight R for
> that anyway.
> 
> Terry Therneau
> 
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-----
Frank Harrell
Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University
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