Tim Cutts schrieb:
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.
In that respect you should have a look at Emacs/XEmacs/ESS package. This package combines the power of command line and reproducibility of what has been done to generate graphs or whatever you like. Its also equipped with a nice ref-card-pdf which is very helpful to learn common shortcuts to increase your productivity levels. I wouldn't call ESS necessarily a GUI in a traditional sense, though.
When I started using R I was inclined to use the RCommander-GUI. After fiddling with this for a while I came to the conclusion that its possibilities are, at least for the moment, really limited. Furthermore some things increased my irritation levels, i.e. orientation to push the correct buttons to achieve a specific task. If I hit a false button I hardly wasn't able to find out what actually went wrong.
Nevertheless, for me as a beginner in GNU R, who never used S before, but primarily SPSS and BMDP in early times, it is a long way to gain some control of advanced aspects of using R. This is also true despite the fact that I took statistics courses for several years and do have experiences in research projects (social sciences and epidemiology), so I'll would agree that using GNU R has some hidden costs for me!
To sum up, what I am in need to is an extensive example based help-system, focused on how to do things in R. In parts this is already there, i.e. SimpleR from Verzani (contributed docs area) etc.
Hopefully I can contribute to this in future, since it is seems to me invaluable to learn R by going through example-based lessons (some are found in vignette() ).
These are much more comprehensible to me than those short reference like entries in the current help-system, mostly due to their very technical approach (same is to be said about the official GNU R manuals, especially "The R Language", which wasn't a great help for me when I took my first look at GNU R). In this context something like the GuideMaps of Vista come to my mind!
But to be as clear as possible, I think GNU R is great and I appreciate all the efforts done by the R core team and associates!
Nevertheless it seems to be valuable to re-think the help-system in R with respect to those who may have a good understanding in statistics, but lacking some basic experiences in how to introduce themselves to sophisticated world of R/S languages.
Regards
Thomas
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