On 17 Nov 2004, at 2:27 pm, Patrick Burns wrote:
I think Ted Harding was on the mark when he said that it is the help
system that needs enhancement. I can imagine a system that gets the
user to the right function and then helps fill in the arguments; all of the
time pointing them towards the command line rather than away from
it.
I think this is spot on. My situation is that I am a scientist turned system administrator, and R is a package which I am increasingly being asked to install for the use of scientists at this Institute. I am by no means a statistician; the statistics I learned in A-level maths almost 20 years ago were as far as I got, and most of that I have forgotten. But I like to have some understanding of the software packages I am asked to support, so I've been looking at R with a view to learning some of its more basic functions. It looks potentially very useful to me anyway for summarising activity on the supercomputing cluster that I run.
So I'm a newbie to R, armed with only a very basic knowledge of statistics (I know the difference between a Normal and a Poisson distribution at least, and with a bit of prodding could probably remember a binomial distribution too). I'm an experienced programmer in several languages, and a PhD-level scientist.
And yet I have still found R really quite hard to learn, and this is principally because the on-line help is a reference manual. I'm sure it's a fabulous resource if you're a statistician who uses R every day, but for me it's not very helpful.
The R Intro PDF is good, but it would be nice if it were integrated better, with hyperlinks to the reference documentation, or to other parts of the introduction, for those platforms that support such things (it looks like this was intended for MacOS X, which is the version I am playing with for my own use, although the version I maintain for users is on Linux [ and would be on Alpha/Tru64 too if I could get it to pass its tests ]) but the on-line help link to the Intro on the Aqua R version brings up a blank page, so I'm using the generic PDF document instead.
I think the GUI question has nothing to do with the hidden costs of the GPL, or otherwise. This is the age-old ease-of-use versus power and capability argument.
I don't think a fancy GUI is necessary - the GUI aspects that have been added to R on Mac OS X are sufficient. I get the impression that the real power of R is the fact that really it's a programming language, and should probably be treated and learned as such. Quite apart from the fact that a GUI will necessarily be a somewhat restricted subset of the total functionality, and a lot slower to use once you've taken the effort to learn the software, I think there is another danger, which I have already seen in other pieces of software in the bioinformatics community. Users frequently run completely pointless analyses through the GUI wrappers we provide. The users using the command line interfaces typically do much more sensible things.
If you make a piece of software trivial for a user to use without thinking about what they're doing, then the users won't think. I may not know much about statistics, but what little I do know is that understanding exactly what form of analysis or significance test is required to be meaningful is a real skill that takes a lot of experience to master. Having to perform that analysis with written commands means that your method is recorded, and could be published, and more importantly be checked and reproduced by other researchers. It also gives you ample time to think about what you're doing, rather than just bashing out a pretty graph which actually has no real meaning whatsoever.
Any GUI to R could (and should) be able to store the command line equivalent to what it has just done, to satisfy the reproducible criterion above, but I suspect it could still lead to some pretty shoddy work being done by careless and lazy scientists, and we get enough of that already.
Tim
-- Dr Tim Cutts Informatics Systems Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute GPG: 1024D/E3134233 FE3D 6C73 BBD6 726A A3F5 860B 3CDD 3F56 E313 4233
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