Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How the R-project is taking over statistical analysis software

sites.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 61 posts

Re: How the R-project is taking over statistical analysis software

#31

Post by 6ren »

cageface wrote: post #29
6ren wrote: post #27

I think open-source eventually replaces commercial products, in the same way that proprietary products become commoditized. The response for commercial products is also the same: continual differentiation, adding new features, benefits, support, documentation etc. Exceptions are also the same: natural monopolies (e.g. strong network effects). Open-source is great at hill-climbing, where there are clear directions for…

Counter-examples abound. Can you name even one open source app that has displaced a mature, user-facing desktop app with a non-trivial UI, other than a web browser? Open source only seems to win in domains in which it makes sense for companies to share work in order to compete at a higher tier of functionality.

You skipped the bit about differentiation: if, for example, photoshop didn't keep improving, do you think the gimp would never catch up? I think you could find lots of examples where today's open source version is better than an x-years-old proprietary product.

The only way it realistically can realistically happen if is the commercial product is not being improved (i.e. differentiated) any more. Your example is one of these - standardization is related to commodification.

I suspect also that user-facing apps are easier to keep improving, because the user is right there, and always has more needs that could be served (e.g. text editors will evolve til they can read mail; those that can't will be replaced by those that can). Non-user facing apps tend to be defined by their environment, rather than by users - although, any component that creates a benefit that the user wants more of will keep being improved (from Clayton Christensen). e.g. databases, CPUs.

Re: How the R-project is taking over statistical analysis software

#32

Post by jcdreads »

Probably worth noting about the author:

> Robert A. Muenchen is the author of R for SAS and SPSS Users and, with Joseph M. Hilbe, R for Stata Users. He is also the creator of r4stats.com, a popular web site devoted to helping people learn R. Bob is a consulting statistician with 30 years of experience

Disclaimer: I hate R's syntax, but my company's analytics group uses R for just about everything.

Re: How the R-project is taking over statistical analysis software

#33

Post by earl »

6ren wrote: post #27

I think open-source eventually replaces commercial products, in the same way that proprietary products become commoditized. The response for commercial products is also the same: continual differentiation, adding new features, benefits, support, documentation etc. Exceptions are also the same: natural monopolies (e.g. strong network effects). Open-source is great at hill-climbing, where there are clear directions for…

I don't think it's obvious that open source displaces commercial for scientific computing. For every example like R which has in many places displaced S-Plus, there are counterexamples like matlab, for which the open source clone Octave is a bad joke, at least the last time I tried using it: missing functions, slowness, extreme difficulty installing; or Mathematica, or eviews, or gauss, or Maple.

One other potential factor: a lot of this software is driven by academic use, either because academics used it or that's where people were first exposed, and academics often receive large discounts.

Re: How the R-project is taking over statistical analysis software

#34

Post by ehsanu1 »

earl wrote: post #33
6ren wrote: post #27

I think open-source eventually replaces commercial products, in the same way that proprietary products become commoditized. The response for commercial products is also the same: continual differentiation, adding new features, benefits, support, documentation etc. Exceptions are also the same: natural monopolies (e.g. strong network effects). Open-source is great at hill-climbing, where there are clear directions for…

I don't think it's obvious that open source displaces commercial for scientific computing. For every example like R which has in many places displaced S-Plus, there are counterexamples like matlab, for which the open source clone Octave is a bad joke, at least the last time I tried using it: missing functions, slowness, extreme difficulty installing; or Mathematica, or eviews, or gauss, or Maple. One other potential…

When did you last try Octave? Professor Andrew Ng recommended using Octave (probably because it's free) for the online Stanford machine learning class (http://ml-class.org/).

Re: How the R-project is taking over statistical analysis software

#35

Post by dewarrn1 »

roxtar wrote: post #10
dewarrn1 wrote: post #9

I use R as my primary data-analysis tool for almost all of my work, with occasional recourse to SAS for certain specialized models (e.g., PROC GLIMMIX for generalized mixed models). My only complaint is the awful default IDE, which can be mitigated to a large extent by scripting elsewhere and source()ing the script, and some odd edge behaviors including the mystifying row names of dataframes, the difficulty of droppi…

Default IDE? Do you mean the R interpreter REPL? If you are looking for a nice IDE for R, I would suggest RStudio: http://rstudio.org/

This looks slick, thanks for the pointer!

Re: How the R-project is taking over statistical analysis software

#36

Post by bwaynelewis »

traveldotto1 wrote: post #7

love R.. but have to say because it's open source, you do have to watch for the quality of libraries

The core libraries available in R are some of the most well-reviewed, carefully written, and correct codes available.

There are a huge amount of available libraries (thousands!) of variable quality thanks to the open nature of the project. But commercial software has problems too, especially with new and niche products. And when something goes wrong in those cases, you can't see why for yourself. Worse, other independent experts would not have the chance to either.

Re: How the R-project is taking over statistical analysis software

#37

Post by burgerbrain »

traveldotto1 wrote: post #12
burgerbrain wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that would still be the case under any license.

yes.. but for less adopted or emerging platforms, you have to be more conscious of the source of the library, and should look at the source to verify its functionalities

This still has nothing to do with the licensing of the software.

Re: How the R-project is taking over statistical analysis software

#38

Post by botj »

ehsanu1 wrote: post #34
earl wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's obvious that open source displaces commercial for scientific computing. For every example like R which has in many places displaced S-Plus, there are counterexamples like matlab, for which the open source clone Octave is a bad joke, at least the last time I tried using it: missing functions, slowness, extreme difficulty installing; or Mathematica, or eviews, or gauss, or Maple. One other potential…

When did you last try Octave? Professor Andrew Ng recommended using Octave (probably because it's free) for the online Stanford machine learning class ( http://ml-class.org/ ).

Probably not for a while. At this point octave has a TON of Matlab compatibility:

The grammar is pretty spot-on although there is usually some release latency when Mathworks changes it (obviously since their plans are not made know. Ahead of time).

Octave even has Matlab source level compatibility for mex files although they are slower than octaves own c interface.

If you start drifting away from Matlab core needs into the specialized add ins Mathworks provides (simulink, financial packages, etc) then Octave can't help. If you need those then I find that Matlab is rarely the tool for the job either (you just don't know it yet ;))

Re: How the R-project is taking over statistical analysis software

#40

Post by linhir »

csmt wrote: post #14
aditya wrote: post #5

Can someone point me to a good introduction/resources to R? Especially for web stuff?

R in Nutshell is pretty good book: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596801717.do

I do a good bit of R programming, and R in a Nutshell has been the best quick reference guide I have found.
Post reply on HN