James Wettenhall schreef op de 21e dag van de wijnmaand van het jaar 2005: > We may have to agree to disagree about some things, but I hope > this has made my point of view a little clearer.
Actually, your elaborate response makes much sense to me. I understand now that it is not just about replacing the command line with a GUI. It is not like LaTeX versus Word (i.e. good versus bad), but about organising and streamlining tasks, doing "higher level" things. At least, that is what I think it is. This is a topic I have been struggling with for quite some time. For years, I have been working on software for dialectometrics and cartography. At the beginning, just for doing research at our institute. But soon, it developed into something people from other institutes can use. A large set of command line programs, manual pages, an R interface, and quite an extensive tutorial with example material. My employer urged me to add some sort of GUI. It would make more people willing to try using the software. I resisted the idea of a GUI. For one thing, I work on Linux but the GUI should be used on Windows. (Java is too bothersome. Smalltalk too clumsy. And I didn't know about Python yet.) But the main problem was: I had no idea what a GUI should look like, what it was supposed to do. It took me quite some time, working with my own software, before I was able to look at it from a distance. The software is just a toolkit. I didn't want a Graphical Toolkit. What I wanted was something like a Graphical Project Manager, something task oriented, with and interactive help system that guides the user through the work. It is still fresh. I haven't had any responses on people using the GUI, so I don't know yet if this is what people helps. What I still think as one of the biggest obstacles for using my software is not cured by the GUI. You still need to select and prepare the data. If you want maps, you have to provide map data, in a format the software understands. This GUI I built is quite specific. It assumes a quite narrow purpose (though parts of the software can be used independently for quite other purposes): you start with a set of dialect data, you do some calculations on that data to make estimates of differences between dialects, and you visualise these dialect differences on a geographic map. I still don't see anything like that for R. A general GUI for R? What are the "higher level task" you use R for? It only makes sense to me if you want to use R in a specific field, such as in Bioconductor. You build a GUI to that specific higher level application of R. Or does anyone want to transform R into something like a spreadsheet program? There are people making a GUI for LaTeX to make it look like Word, a WYSIWYG, but to me that seems like a very silly thing to do. For those interested, here is my software: http://www.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/L04/ And the GUI is here: http://www.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/L04/pyL04/ -- Peter Kleiweg http://www.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/ ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel