I disagree with Martin. I think his confidence interval is sufficient for management decisions. There are three basic questions that should be answered:
1) Does it do what we want?
2) Will it disappear?
3) Is the quality sufficient?
Question 1 can only be answered within the organization.
Question 2 is partly answered by Martin's and other's estimates of
the user base. The volume of messages on R-help is another clue --
this is probably more correlated with the number of new users than
the total number of users.
I think there is sufficient evidence that R will survive at least as long as the expected duration of a manager's tenure, and that there will be a reasonable supply of potential employees with knowledge of it.
As for Question 3, I -- who am a magnet for bugs-- have been using R intensely for 2 years now, and have only found a couple of esoteric bugs (one of which is clearly not down to R) plus two or three minor bugs which have been fixed. This is a level of excellence that I never would have imagined.
In contrast, for 5 weeks I've been using a now obsolete version of
another language not unlike R on an operating system that ought to be
obsolete. In that time I've found 2 serious bugs (i.e., system terminating --
only one of which is esoteric), and a couple other moderately annoying
bugs.
Patrick Burns
Burns Statistics [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 (0)20 8525 0696 http://www.burns-stat.com (home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")
Martin Maechler wrote:
About a `confidence interval': If we log transform it becomes feasible to give an interval I'm ``quite confident'' about:
log10(N) \in [3.5, 5.3]
but then that's probably not informative enough for management decisions.
Martin
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