On 17-Nov-04 Philippe Grosjean wrote: > Hello, > > In the latest 'Scientific Computing World' magazine > (issue 78, p. 22), there is a review on free statistical > software by Felix Grant ("doesn't have to pay good money > to obtain good statistics software"). As far as I know, > this is the first time that R is even mentioned in this > magazine, given that it usually discuss commercial products.
Hi Philippe, Thanks for a most interesting post on this question. Further comments below. Felix Grant's article is excellent, and well balanced. > In this article, the analysis of R is interesting. It is > admitted that R is a great software with lots of potentials, > but: "All in all, R was a good lesson in the price that may > have to be paid for free software: I spent many hours > relearning some quite basic things taken for granted in the > commercial package." Those basic things are releated with > data import, obtention of basic plots, etc... with a claim > for a missing more intuitive GUI in order to smooth a little > bit the learning curve. It would better represent the balanced view of the article to further quote: "In fact, the whole file menu in R looks either elegantly uncluttered of frightenly obscure, depending on your point of view." "It [the effort of learning] is the price paid, just as the dollars or euros for a commercial package would be. For that price, I've learned a great deal -- and nor only about R. And I shall remember it when I next have to find a heavyweight solution for a big problem presented by a small charitable client with an invisible budget. It's a huge, awe-inspiring package -- easier to perceive as such because the power is not hidden beneath a cosmetic veneer." This last remark is, in my view, particularly significant. See below. > There are several R GUI projects ongoing, but these are > progressing very slowly. The main reason is, I believe, > that a relatively low number of programmers working on R > are interested by this field. Most people wanting such a > GUI are basic user that do not (cannot) contribute... > And if they eventually become more knowledgeable, they > tend to have other interests. > > So, is this analysis correct: are there hidden costs for > free software like R in the time required to learn it? > At least currently, for the people I know (biologists, > ecologists, oceanographers, ...), this is perfectly true. > This is even an insurmountable barrier for many of them > I know, and they have given up (they come back to Statistica, > Systat, or S-PLUS using exclusively functions they can > reach through menus/dialog boxes). Non-GUI vs GUI is not intrinsically linked to Free Software as such. There are well-known FS programs which are essentially GUI-based -- as an easy example, consider all the FS Web Browsers such as Netscape, Mozilla, ... . If you want the graphics experiences offered by the Web, you're in a graphics screen anyway, and so it may as well be programmed around a GUI. Others, such as OpenOffice, have deliberately built on a GUI approach in order to emulate The Other Thing. There are a lot of FS programs which offer a GUI, usually somewhat on the basic side, which nonetheless encapsulates the entire functionality of the program and saves the user the task of composing a possibly complex command-line or even a script. The comment "hidden beneath a cosmetic veneer" is, in my view, somewhat directly linked to commercial software. If you sell software, you want a big market. So you want to include the people who will never learn how to work software from a command line; and the sweeter the taste of the eye candy, the more such people will feel enjoyment in using the software. The fact that their usage is limited to what has been pre-programmed into the menus is not going to affect many such people, since typically their useage is limited to a very small subset of what is in fact possible. This in turn leads, of course, to the phenomenon of "software-driven analysis", where people only do what the GUI allows (or, more precisely, easily allows); and this leads on in turn to a culture in which people tend to believe that Statistics is what they can do with a particular software package. S-Plus does its best to compromise: as well as GUI access to a pretty wide range of functions, there is the Command Line Window where the user can explicitly type in commands. (I dare say many R users, in S-Plus, may tend to work in the latter since they are already used to it.) But, as always in a GUI, one can tend to get lost in the ramifications. Also, things like the big arrays of tiny icons you get when you click on the "2D Plots" or "3D Plots" buttons in the S-Plus toolbar can be trying on the eyes and time-consuming to pick through. > Of course, the solution is to have a decent GUI for R, > but this is a lot of work, and I wonder if the intrinsic > mechanism of GPL is not working against such a development > (leading to a very low pool of programmers actively involved > in the elaboration of such a GUI, in comparison to the very > large pool of competent developers working on R itself). > > Do not misunderstand me: I don't give up with my GUI project, > I am just wondering if there is a general, ineluctable > mechanism that leads to the current R / R GUI situation as > it stands,... and consequently to a "general rule" that > there are indeed most of the time "hidden costs" in free > software, due to the larger time required to learn it. > I am sure there are counter-examples, however, my feeling > is that, for Linux, Apache, etc... the GUI (if there is one) > is often a way back in comparison to the potentials in > the software, leading to a steep learning curve in order to > use all these features. Often, I think, in the Free Software world, people get involved because they want to produce something which achieves a task. Once they have a program which does that, then their aim is satisfied. The GUI, in many cases, would be additional work which would add nothing to what the software can do in terms of tasks to be achieved. So in such cases, yes, I would tend to agree that there is an intrinsic mechanism that discourages work on a GUI for its own sake. You can add to that the fact that once a developer has got to the point of creating such software, successful in the tasks, they may have got beyond the point at which they can readily sympathise with users who have not acquired such skills: they no longer perceive, from their own experience, that there is a problem. However, this leaves people like you, having colleagues who "come back to Statistica, Systat, or S-PLUS using exclusively functions they can reach through menus/dialog boxes." By this experience, you are aware of the problem, and rightly feel that they would be helped by having access to the sort of GUI/Menu interface that they are used to using. One genuine benefit that the GUI offers, especially to beginners with a particular software package, is that the resources of the software can perhaps more easily and rapidly be explored through the GUI, rather than searching laboriously through the documentation of functions, extra packages, and so on. This means that they more readily come to perceive what is available though of course this is limited to what the GUI will show them. But a good "Help" window can break that barrier. Perhaps R itself is less helpful than it might be in this respect. The R-help list bristles with queries of the form "How can I do X?", which I think is evidence of a problem. While some of these queries clearly originate from people who have taken no trouble to explore readily accessible information, many others can not be so easily dismissed. If you know something about what you're after, once you realise that a judiciously formulated "help.search" can throw up a lot of possibilities you are well on your way. So, for instance (as in a recent query about 2-D Fourier transform for spatial data) 'help.search("fourier")' gives relevant information. This, though, still fails for information in packages which you have not installed. Perhaps I'm about to reveal my own culpable ignorance here, but I'm not aware of a "full R info" package which would be installed as part of R-base, being a database of info about R-base itself and also every current additional package, such that a "help.search" would show all resources -- including those not installed -- which match a query (and flag the non-installed ones as such so that the user knows what to install for a particular purpose). Whether this needs to be supplemented by a GUI is a point that could be discussed from several points of view. Philippe's biological/oceanographic users no doubt would be considerably helped, provided they can in due course come to the point where they can start to work "beyond the GUI" (if indeed they need to). Personally, however, I find that GUI work is slower and more error-prone than command-line work. Swanning the mouse around the screen, visually idebtifying icons and buttons, clicking on this and that in order to see whether it's what you want, and so on, is much more time-consuming than typiing in a command. And God help you if you accidentally click on something destructive! I'll close with an immortal quotation (from Charles Curran, of the UK Unix Users Group): "I can touch-type, but I can't touch-mouse" Best wishes to all, Ted. > I would be interested by your impressions and ideas on this topic. > > Best regards, > > Philippe Grosjean > > ..............................................<°}))><........ /\ / | .............................<°}))><........ :) >=--- \ | \/ Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 [NB: New number!] Date: 17-Nov-04 Time: 12:34:31 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------ ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html