On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 6:58 PM, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > All I know is this: > > 1) We have "sold" a lot of Sage by saying it's all in there, and at least > some people have used Sage+R effectively. Estimates of how many vary > wildly. But non-zero.
Nobody is suggesting deprecating the potential to use Sage+R. > 2) rpy2 might be there, but as far as I can tell most people who've used > Sage+R use it via the "dumb pexpect interface". rpy2 is vastly better than anything else when large amounts of data need to be shared back and forth between Sage and R. It's the only option in that case. > 3) All those thousands of packages are darn useful and can't be easily > replaced with pandas or anything else. This is the same as 1. > 4) kernels are nice but how do you get Sage command line to do that? I > personally would only know how to do it, sort of, in Jupyter notebook, and > not at all clear how to send stuff back and forth between Sage and R there. > In SageMathCloud we've been supporting actual users of Sage, R, etc., for a few years now. People frequently request that we install R packages. As far as I can tell, 100% of the time they are using R directly, via scripts, via %r mode in a notebook (either Sagews or Jupyter). I've never once heard of anybody actually trying to use Sage + R yet. As far as I can tell, Sage simply doesn't add anything of value that people care or know about when they are using R... If people are using Python to do stats they use the Python tools; if they are using R, then R is already good enough for what they are doing, and Sage doesn't add anything. > My conclusion: > > 1) Definitely don't remove R from Sage, unless we go back on the mission > statement. The mission statement is to create a viable open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab. Not including R in Sage does not mean going back on that mission statement. > We want to be able to easily use all those extra packages with > algebra and graph theory. (Not to mention current users.) > 2) Finding a way to deprecate (!!!) current R behavior is viable, but should > be a longer-than-normal period. Including graphics and other stuff. If > rpy2 is the answer, great; I recall it being deemed not as satisfactory at > some point but maybe no one ever tried since pexpect was "good enough". We could remove R from sage-7.5 and the current behavior would likely work exactly as is (via pexpect) as long as R is installed somewhere on the computer. In fact, things would be better, since all install issues involving R itself would be the responsibility of the R project. > 3) Excellent idea to integrate pandas or whatever the current flavor of the > month is far better! pandas is not just some "flavor of the month" stats library. It's been around since at least 2010, and is a sort of defacto standard at this point. There's at least one Oreilly book on it. > 4) But if no one is willing/able/whatever to make these new interfaces, > keeping pexpect is definitely far better than simply jettisoning R. > (Note e.g. people who have used Sage cell server to embed R graphics in web > pages - not sure how that would be affected, if it's a separate R process or > via Sage?) Andrey would type "apt-get install R" (or whatever) and be done. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sage-devel" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- William (http://wstein.org) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
