New York Times applauds R's power
R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts - NYTimes.com
Yesterday’s New York Times (Vance, 01/07/2009) applauds R’s power, which is used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. As a open-source statistical program, R is versatile yet intuitive, easily adaptable, and free.
NYT notes that R has become increasingly popular “because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use” (for such a powerful tool). “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems,” said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google.
Since R is open-source, data analysts can improve the software’s code or write variations for specific tasks. On the internet there are close to 1,600 different packages written for R, which “add advanced algorithms, colored and textured graphs and mining techniques to dig deeper into databases.”
“The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that’s already available, so you’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”
R’s rising popularity, especially at universities, may threaten SAS Institute, the leading business software company that specializes in data analysis software and has more than $2 billion annual revenue in the market.
Though making no profit at all, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, who created R in 1996 at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, express satisfaction that many companies, as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, and Bank of America, profit from the fruits of their labor and that of hundred s of volunteers.
They seem not to regret about the open-source decision made at the first place, for that is a key part of R’s success. “We could have chosen to be commercial, and we would have sold five copies of the software,” Mr. Ihaka said.