On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:27:41 +0100 Wacek Kusnierczyk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> but then it might be worth asking whether carrying on with misdesign > for backward compatibility outbalances guaranteed crashes in future > users' programs, [...] Why is it worth asking this if nobody else asks it? Most notably a certain software company in Redmond, Washington, which is famous for carrying on with bad designs and bugs all in the name of backward compatibility. Apparently this company also sets industry standards so it must be o.k. to do that. ;-) > which result in confused complaints, Didn't see any confused complaints yet. Only polite requests for enlightenment after coming across behaviour that useRs found surprising given their knowledge of R. The confused complaints seem to be posted as responses to responses to such question by people who for what ever reason seem to have an axe to grind with R. > the need for responses suggesting hacks to bypass the design, Not to bypass the design, but to achieve what the person whats. As any programming language, R is a Turing machine and anything can be done with it; it is just a question how. > and possibly incorrect results published I guess such things cannot be avoided no matter what software you are using. I am more worried about all the analysis done in MS Excel, in particular in the financial maths/stats world. Also, to me it seems that getting incorrect results is a relative small problem compared with the frequent misinterpretation of correct results or the use of inappropriate statistical techniques. > because r is likely to do everything but what the user expects. This is quite a strong statement, and I wonder what the basis is for that a statement. Care to provide any evidence? R is a tool; a very powerful one and hence also very sharp. It is easy to cut yourself with it, but when one knows how to use it gives the results that one expects. I guess the problem in this age of instant gratification is that people are not willing to put in the time and effort to learn about the tools they are using. How about spending some time learning about R instead of continuously griping about it? Just imagine how much you could have learned in the time you spend writing all those e-mails. :) > r suffers from early made poor decisions, but then this in itself is > not a good reason to carry on. Radford Neal is also complaining on his blog (http://radfordneal.wordpress.com/) about what he thinks are design flaws in R. Why don't you two get together and design a good substitute without any flaws? Or is that too hard? ;-) Cheers, Berwin =========================== Full address ============================= Berwin A Turlach Tel.: +65 6516 4416 (secr) Dept of Statistics and Applied Probability +65 6516 6650 (self) Faculty of Science FAX : +65 6872 3919 National University of Singapore 6 Science Drive 2, Blk S16, Level 7 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Singapore 117546 http://www.stat.nus.edu.sg/~statba ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.