>>> "John Fox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 1/3/2006 9:35 am >>> as always, raises some excellent points. I have some responses, interspersed
<<<< It's not reasonable to argue with someone's experience -- that is, if people tell me that they found R harder to learn than SAS, say, then I believe them -- but that's not my experience in teaching relatively inexperienced students to use statistical software. A few points: >>> A lot of this probably has to do with what you learned first. I learned SAS long before I learned R. Had it been reversed, I would probably find SAS hard. <<< (1) Casual and initial use of statistical software is easier through a GUI, so it's not reasonable, for example, to compare learning to use SPSS via its GUI to learning R via commands. >>> True, but I was comparing SAS and R, and this originally started with STATA and R, and all 3 of those are command driven. <<<< (4) Not everyone has the same experience and thinks in the same way. I've used many different statistical packages and computing environments, and have learned quite a few programming languages (most of which I can no longer use). Of these, I found APL and R the easiest to learn, and Lisp (Lisp-Stat) the hardest. Sometimes, though, it's worth expending the effort to learn something that's difficult -- I feel that I got a lot out of learning to program in Lisp, for example. >>>> This is, I think, a big part of it. I think that R would be a lot easier to learn for someone who has learned some other computer language. I have not. I agree that learning something difficult can often be worth it. Peter ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html